Mr. Bill Zech.

MR. ZECH: Yes, thank you. My name is Bill Zech. I'm Chairman of the Trade Committee for the California Asparagus Commission and more importantly I'm a farmer in Stockton. I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to us.

My message is pretty simple. You have my written comments. I won't read them to you. If you read them, I know they're a part of the record, I would appreciate it. I just want to reiterate to you, like the olives, we're a minor crop, minor crop, 25,000 to 28,000 acres in the state of California, gross sales $60 million to $70 million. But trade is vitally important to our interests as Asparagus farmers. And Asparagus is very important to the families that grow it.

And that's the basic message I want you to take, I hope you take with you. We've been impacted severely by NAFTA. We basically have agreed to give up all the tariffs and they're in the process of being reduced.

You know better than I, but in six or seven years they'll be eliminated and they have been reduced dramatically with a significant increase in Mexican Asparagus imports to the United States. We're feeling that. We're feeling it significantly. And it's very difficult for us to compete when we're paying $8 to $10 an hour for labor when our competition is paying $8 to $10 a day and working on much different standards in terms of ag chemicals. And I won't get into that issue per se and I'm not accusing them of anything. I'm just saying there are different standards, there are different laws and it's difficult for us to compete on that playing field.

In terms of the tariffs, we also, you know, we're dependent upon you. After the Uruguay Round, even after full implementation, we still have a ten percent tariff in Europe. It's a major customer of ours and we still have that burden.

Mr. Hempel talked very eloquently about the export subsidies, the domestic supports and transparency issues. Those all affect us too. For example, really in Europe, Switzerland is a major customer of ours. They have approximately, from what we can tell, maybe 200 acres of Asparagus. Yet, every year we go through this song and dance of licensing our Asparagus when their production comes in to protect just a couple of growers. And it wreaks havoc in the marketplace and it's something that we spend a lot of time and effort on. We continue to pay for tariffs on virtually all of our 15 export markets, Japan included.

In the phytosanitary area we continue to face problems there. Most specifically what was frustrating us this last year was Taiwan. We had numerous inquiries from Taiwanese importers wanting to import our product and we couldn't ship it, because the Government, in our opinion, raised a red-herring issue about a burrowing nematode issue. We can't find it. It's pretty tough to prove a negative. And they said well, we're concerned about the burrowing nematode and we said well, we don't have it. There's no evidence that we have it.

So we -- I guess my -- in conclusion, you know, we continue to have these issues. We're not a big player, but we need to have a stake at the table, because we certainly have a very large personal economic status in this game. So thank you very much for your time.