MR. STEVENS: Good afternoon. My name is Martin Stevens, Golden Gem Growers. I want to add my thanks to those of others for you folks coming down and allowing us to talk to you. I am one of the small third generation citrus growers, however I'm here primarily to speak for a much larger group of growers. I am a member and also an employee for over 40 years and Senior Vice-President of Golden Gem Growers.

Golden Gem is a true cooperative. It was formed in 1947 by three growers who didn't feel like they could get a fair deal anywhere else. It now has over 450 members who own almost 40,000 acres of citrus. Citrus is grown in 28 counties in Florida and we have members in each one of those.

I'm going to abbreviate most of my remarks because most of them have been covered by other people, especially Andy LaVigne. But these growers collectively have invested millions of dollars in facilities in order to try to improve the return on their investment in the groves. The cooperative can do it all including fresh fruit packing, FCOJ not from concentrate both in bulk and packaged form.

In addition to the 450 growers there are over 800 employees and that doesn't count over 1,000 more who work the groves and pick the fruit on a seasonal basis. None of these people would benefit and all would suffer if anything would happen to the equalizing import tariff that we have on FCOJ.

On a level playing field, the Florida citrus industry can compete with anyone in the world but we don't have a level playing field because of all the things that have been brought out previously. It probably never will be a level playing field because by the time the Brazilians start to pay people as much as we're paying here, we'll probably be paying two or three times as much. After all, in my career I've seen the minimum wage go up over seven times what it was when I started here.

But one of the things that -- I'll leave out most of the rest of this but I wanted to emphasize one thing. The much touted benefit of free trade would be that you would have lower consumer prices. Believe me, in this situation it ain't gonna happen. I can well remember the good old days when I sold fresh fruit and the price that the consumer paid had a large bearing on the prices that we charged for fruit. If we lowered our prices, the retailers lowered their prices and we moved more fruit and that was how we got ourselves out of trouble. It's supposed to work that way.

You probably have economists on your staff that will tell you it would work that way if things like that did

-- if we got rid of part of the tariff. But I can tell you it simply won't. There's something different in the real world today in this fresh -- not just citrus, but also processed citrus and vegetables. That is the fact that the retailers have learned that they can hold their prices up high, buy lower and simply make more profit. They do not lower their price every time we lower our price. How that happens, I don't know the reason for it, but I'm sure we would appreciate it if you would check that out. It's real.

I'm sure Commissioner Crawford's office can provide you with all kinds of documentation on that on the kind of markups that these people have been getting. I would like to say to those that are left in the audience, I think we all should take heart. I appreciate the attitude that's been displayed by you folks and the others and the opening remarks. It's a far different tone and a different attitude than a meeting similar to this that I went to -- I don't remember how many years ago it was, but it was in Vero Beach.

The gentleman who came down from Washington spent a little time riding around Vero Beach and about every second or third car he saw was a Mercedes. He made the assumption that all those Mercedes were being driven by citrus growers and he got up in front of a group just like this and said that if we lowered the tariff on orange juice by 5 or 10 cents a pound solid, it appeared to him that the only difference that would make was that the average citrus grower would just move from this model of Mercedes down to this model of Mercedes.

So I appreciate very much that that is not your attitude. Citrus growers as a group are not a bunch of fat cats. We're just a bunch of hardworking, down-to-earth people that are paddling as hard as we can to keep our nose above water. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)