Ms. Thomas-Price.

MS. THOMPSON-PRICE: Yes, my name is Nancy Thompson-Price. I'm going to make some rather general comments. I was only notified at about 1:30 today that I was on the panel, for which I'm very grateful. But I was up in the Mendocino coast at 3:30 this morning driving down to the San Francisco airport and then returning to Davis where I was napping when I was called.

So I'm Nancy Thompson-Price. I am the vice co-chair of the Alliance For Democracy, a membership based, chapter based national organization with headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. I am also the Davis, California chapter chair and I am the project director for the Food Safety, Food Security Action Campaign of the Alliance For Democracy.

What I've been doing for the last two weeks and what took me to Mendocino was visiting our chapters in California and Oregon to discuss with them what our campaign stance should be on the WTO and agriculture. I began in Los Angeles and attended the WTO hearings there, where a member of our group spoke and gave testimony. And I was in Seattle working with the host committee there on ways that we can provide the citizens a voice in the WTO meetings there in late November.

As the concluding panelist, I guess, I would like to bring to the table a request that your panel look at certain overriding principles. I think that the general public can, to some degree, grasp the specific details of the various sector agreements being proposed and presented. But the people that I've spoken to on this trip can certainly grasp the issues of sovereignty and democracy and the precautionary principle.

So I would strongly urge you that in considering any of the SPS agreement that you examine carefully maintaining a very strong commitment to the precautionary principle. I am not certain, I haven't read enough about the agricultural proposals to feel that I can speak with authority on that sector. But I can when it comes to the forest and wood products proposals, which is very well written, practically complete, and would like to see the precautionary principle abandoned.

I think in the statements made earlier about Bovine growth hormone in the European Union, the Monarch butterfly, the potato, that the controversy over the science, the product, the benefits to the public should make clear, even in these few examples, we can also look at bovine growth hormone in milk, that we cannot do away with the precautionary principle. We need to safeguard public health and we need to err on the side of caution in all of these matters and not have corporate pressure for profits and for competitiveness urge us in the opposite direction. So I would like you to safeguard us by safeguarding that principle.

Second of all, I'd like to speak to the issue of sovereignty and democracy. The issue of fair trade is sort of a mantra. But fair trade, as it's being constructed, particularly with the dispute mechanism involved at the moment with the international tribunal, does not lead, in my view and the view of our organization, to a fair hearing that allows the public to be a part, the public and citizens to be a part of that process.

The dispute panels are chosen by the disputants. They're a three-member panel. I think you know how it works. It's not transparent. It's not open. It does not allow for review. It does not allow for amicus brief. And so I would like this panel to strongly consider that we need to review the dispute mechanism regardless of the particulars about the trade issue that we're dealing with. We need to really look at this dispute mechanism.

If we can achieve fair trade, that's one thing, but this dispute mechanism is not fair to the general public.

Thank you very much.