Mr. Joe Rollo from the Wine Institute.

MR. ROLLO: Thank you. I'm Joe Rollo, Director of the International Department at the Wine Institute.

Thank you for this opportunity to comment on our objectives for the next round of multilateral talks on agriculture. I'll just simply summarize a few of our objectives. We've filed more detailed statements as requested.

Exports have become an important part of our industry. They represent now about 12 and a half percent of our production, and over the last ten years have grown over 500 percent. But we're still a relatively small player in the world's wine market. We produce about six, seven percent of the world's wine. And our major competition, of course, is EU.

But I do believe that we're about to launch into the second phase of our development of export markets, and that phase is really going to require the reduction of trade barriers and tariffs.

There are three areas that we seek improvement. One is tariffs and you've heard about that. We have the lowest wine tariffs of any producing country in the world. And our major market and our major competitors in Europe have tariffs of three times ours. And in Asia wine tariffs are very high and they serve to restrict the development of consumer demand for wine.

Secondly, production and export subsidies. We have no subsidies for our industry in the market. But the EU subsidies are the highest in the world for wine. And they encompass every type of both production and export subsidies.

The third area is marketing and distribution restriction. There's relatively none in the United States, but we face import monopolies, certification procedures and the inability to invest in certain markets in distribution, and we seek removal of these practices.

About ten years ago, we had a 36 to 1 imbalance in trade, 36 times more wine, the amount of wine was imported than we exported. Because we have developed export markets, the current ratio is about three and a half to one, with about a billion, nine hundred million dollars worth of wine shipped into the United States in 1998, compared to a little over a half billion dollars in sales. And we think with the removal of the these barriers that we face, in five years we can even that imbalance, and that is our goal.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to particularly thank Jim Murphy and Secretary Rominger for your help and support and counsel for our industry. We've done a lot so far. We can, hopefully, take full advantage of the next round.

Thank you.