BROTHER DAVID ANDREWS: When I called Joanie Kiernan about registering for this, she sent me a fax back that said I was the first registrant, and so I quickly put down my preferred time of speaking at 9 a.m.

I'm Brother David Andrews. I'm the executive director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. We are a 75-year-old organization. Since 1940 we've been here in Des Moines, Iowa.

A lot of people wonder what the church has to say about agriculture, about trade, about economics. Those from Iowa will know that (inaudible) my predecessor, was given an award called the Iowa Award, very esteemed award given to very few, for speaking about agriculture very effectively. And also here in Iowa Bishop Murray Stingman, Father Norm White, many others in the Catholic Rural Life movement, which is a national movement, have been speaking about agriculture, trade, and economics, and we have a long history. We're in the real world, not just the heavenly world.

I sit on the domestic policy committee of the Bishops Congress in Washington, D.C., and also serve on a subcommittee on food and agriculture of that conference. I'm also a board member of the Organization for Competitive Markets, which is an organization of farmers and ranchers concerned about the independence of family farmers and about whether or not trade is free and fair. So I'm happy to be here now today.

We in the Catholic Rural Life Movement have a set of principles that have been developed really over the years of reflection on scripture and on our tradition, and I just want to take a few moments to share with you some of the elements of those principles.

Derived by such readings of scripture as in Genesis, where God says that God creates and places the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, in the garden and charges them with a vocation of being tillers of the soil and calls them to tend it and to keep it well.

I'm also a recipient of the tradition that teaches us that when God frees the people of Israel from captivity in Egypt, he calls them to stand erect, to stand up to achieve responsible self-goverance. And so in that sense, then, we're called to respect the dignity of the human person. And some of the proposals, I think, before the WTO would continue to diminish the rights of farmers and farm workers and reduce them to the status of slaves and serfs violating the human dignity that they are given as persons created in the image of God.

Also we have a principle of solidarity developed during the 1930s. This principle says that human communities ought to have the right to self-goverance at the local level, and no higher-level community should strip them of those rights to exercise responsible self-goverance. And so the attempt to universalize laws and regulations and strip -- the stripping of local communities and legislative entities from responsible self-goverance violates that principle of subsidiarity. It's a principle that we developed originally in 1890 but expanded our reflection on it in the 1930s in response to communism and fascism. It's the principle that was adopted formally in the master treaty that allowed for local responsible governance and said that the federal government at -- of the economic union would not strip localities of subsidiary.

And finally I'll just call attention to the common good. An economic model which externalizes risk which does not practice environmental stewardship and does not give regard to social well-being, fails in responsible corporate citizenship and violates the common good. Those are only two of a larger number of principles that we use to evaluate the economy and trade policy. We believe that the economy is made for the person. The person is not to be made as a cog in the wheel of an economy.

Thank you very much.