MR. LAWLESS: Thank you for this opportunity. I'm Eldon Lawless, chairman of the Kansas Wheat Commission, the producer in south central Kansas. For some of those of you out there that have expressed a concern over financial division, I'm also involved in free ag banks. So I do understand the plight that a lot of you are going through, and hopefully we can design a system that will start to help that situation.

I am a wheat producer, and when it comes to trading off any U.S. government support for agriculture in the next trade round, allow me to quote the Secretary's friend and Senator from Kansas, Mr. Pat Roberts, "We already gave at the office." And I think this points to the things that we have to be careful of: That we don't give away too much in order to get some negotiations on the other side.

We would like to see the U.S. government use every tool at their disposal to help find markets for and encourage the sale of U.S. wheat. While Europe uses export price subsidies and government sanction monopoly -- (inaudible).

We are encouraged by -- this is to the Secretary and for Tim Galvin that was here, they are presently looking at some support to help us clean wheat so that we can be competitive with Australia and Canada in our exports. We think this is one initiative that is very important for us. But we also have to be careful that in designing a system, that we can compete the way they compete: By selling a higher-quality product at lower prices. This is one of the things that has not been discussed yet in trade, but it's very obvious that Canada and Australia do use quality as an export subsidy.

I had dinner with the Chairman of the Australia Wheat Board recently. He pointed out that approximately 20 years ago they knew that they could no longer compete with Europe and the United States with export subsidies because their government did not have that system or the price to do so. So he said we knew the only way we could compete was through quality and varietal development and in cleanliness, and they have done a fine job. You know, they beat us in a lot of markets just because of that. We need the opportunity to be able to do the same type of thing.

Global trade is not a new thing. I read a history book about Kansas several years ago. It was on the development of the wheat industry from the 1870s on through the 1900s in Kansas. It pointed out that the price of wheat got up to somewhere in the $2 range, about where it is right today, 100 years later; however, due to some trade disputes with Liverpool, wheat being shipped out of Galveston was shut down. It brought the price of wheat back down almost 7 cents a bushel. That had to do with trade disputes and global trading. This thing is not new, so we're rehashing old history.

On behalf of the wheat organization we work with, we have written testimony to submit that itemizes the issues that those of us who are present for wheat producers feel are important. Thank you for the opportunity to submit those written comments, and be assured that wheat producers are prepared to spend dollars to be heard in this round which we were not the last time.

Thank you very much.