MR. JENSEN: Good afternoon. My name is Richard Jensen. I'm the chief marketing officer at Diamond V Mills in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Diamond V is a family-owned animal feed additive company that's been in business for 57 years. We sell our product throughout the U.S. and Canada and 35 other countries around the world. Export sales this year will amount to approximately 25 percent of our total revenue, so I think you can readily understand why we have an interest in what does or does not go on in Seattle.

To keep within the three-minute guideline, I've narrowed my original list of 17 suggestions down to 2.

First, I would encourage you to remember that trade is essentially business, and in our view, the purpose of business is to create and keep customers. You need to keep in mind that our trading partners and our prospective trading partners are essentially our customers and prospects. We need to create the atmosphere and formulate the policies that will make our customers want to do business with us, that will make them choose us as a supplier they can come back to time and time again for good value, fair treatment, reliable supply, and courteous service. It will help us all if you do what you can to depoliticize the trading process.

I fully realize politics are a part of our collective reality, but I don't believe that asking our customer to adopt our political viewpoint as a precondition of doing business with us is necessarily a customer-friendly approach.

I happened to be in Asia last fall when Vice President Gore delivered a much remarked-upon speech in Malasia. Even some very good generally pro-America customers of ours in Taiwan were quite taken aback and, dare I say, offended by the thrust of the Vice President's remarks.

Our company, perhaps like a number of others represented here, has a significant stake in expanding commerce across the Pacific Rim. We have a good business in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and we have a good beginning in China, and significant prospective business that we wish to develop in Malasia, the Phillipines, Thailand and Vietnam.

All of these countries have very different cultures and socioeconomic systems than does the United States. Understanding those differences and respecting their right to be different will go a long way toward helping us to create and keep customers in each of those countries in the years ahead. We'd appreciate your help in creating that understanding.

Secondly, we would like your help in creating an atmosphere of bargaining in good faith. The frustration of seemingly endless delays in adopting more open trade polices and practices that supposedly have already been agreed upon is most discouraging. Customers can and will decide for themselves what they want to buy without the help of government.

I observed this just again last week when we hosted a delegation to one of our European customer companies. At the first available meal opportunity, with no prompting from us, they all ordered the same thing: A big, thick, juicy piece of certified Angus beef grown right here in Iowa.

The application of biotechnology to food production is a relatively recent development that will someday be held as a revolution. No one wants or expects that we should rush into the unknowns of (inaudible) without the due process of scientific discovery being applied as a safety issue, but when that process has been applied and the issues resolved to the satisfaction of the best scientific minds in the world community, the science should prevail and access be allowed, or reasons given why it won't be. (Inaudible) is not the policy of those who bargain in good faith, and those who have escaped have to be encouraged to carry this tactic in an even broader arena. I believe Mr. Fisher seems to have already discovered this concept.

Thank you for the opportunity this afternoon. Good luck in Seattle.