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LUGAR BACKS FAST TRACK, FREE TRADE, MORE RESEARCH TO FEED THE WORLD WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. ã Free trade and more agricultural research are essential to meet the food demands of a world population expected to triple by 2050, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) told 200 Purdue University agriculture students and faculty during a recent visit.
He argued that subsidies and protectionist tariffs will make food too expensive and difficult to move between countries. "The most efficiently produced goods will have to be able to go where they're needed," Lugar said. He said he supported fast track trade agreement authority for the president: "We have to have it, or no one will take us seriously."
Wally Tyner, head of the Purdue Department of Agricultural Economics and an expert on international food policy, agreed. "No one will negotiate with us if Congress could later modify the deal," he said. "Without fast track, we're dead in the water."
Tyner said trade protection and subsidies make agricultural production too expensive, especially in the European Union. Freer trade would also be a boon to U.S. producers.
"Midwest producers are the most efficient food producers in the world. If barriers are dropped, our producers would dominate the market," Tyner said.
Demand for U.S. farm products is rising every year, Lugar said, and he and called agriculture "a good business in which to be for the future."
Identifying himself several times as a 600-acre corn and soybean farmer from Decatur Township in Marion County, Lugar said he harvests about 140 bushels of corn per acre.
"In 50 years, the Lugars, whoever they will be, will need yields of 400 bushels per acre every year to meet demand," he said. "That's three times the yield on every acre of arable land in the world."
Lugar said most of the arable land in the world already is being farmed, and any increase in food production will come either through new developments in agricultural research or at the expense of rain forests and other natural areas.
He used a forest preserve in Mexico as an example of what can happen when people go hungry, saying that a quarter of the trees on the 400- million-acre tract already have been cut down for subsistence farming. "The land is going now," Lugar said.
The Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, which Lugar chairs, unanimously passed a bill in July that he called "a bold step for agriculture research." It would use $780 million over five years to "provide incentives for brilliant people to step forward and work on these problems," with research on the genetics of food crops, food safety, new products and new methods of agricultural production.
The bill, the Agriculture Research, Extension and Education Reform Act of 1997, would fund the research through the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems. The bill is awaiting action by the full Senate.
Lugar was on campus at the invitation of graduate students in the Department of Agronomy to talk about the future role of the United States in world agriculture.
Sources: Richard Lugar, (202) 224-2079
Wally Tyner, (765) 494-4205
Writer: Chris Sigurdson, (765) 494-8415; e-mail, [email protected]
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