MR. SAUNDERS: Thank you, Secretary Judge. I'm John Saunders, Director of the Missouri Department of Agriculture, and I would say at the outset I wanted to thank Secretary Judge and her staff for helping to put this forum together. I think we can see the importance of it by the size of the crowd and the representations of the states. I would go on to say a big thank you to Secretary Glickman and his staff. Mr. Secretary, we work very closely with your staff and FSA and FAS particularly and also NRTS, and they've been very responsive, I can assure you, to the needs of our farmers in Missouri.

I feel a little bit -- coming up here and after listening to some of these figures from Iowa and Kansas, I feel a little like the two fourth-grade boys that were in my sister's fourth grade class in King City, Missouri this last spring. And the boys, as young boys often do, their dads were both farmers and they were talking about -- they were in an argument about the size of their farm, and well, this one kid had the advantage on the other boy in almost in every category. You know, my dad has a bigger tractor and my dad has a bigger farm and a bigger truck, and it just went on and on. So finally the one boy, he knew he had an ace in the hole, and he saved his zinger for the very last thing. He knew he had to make a point. And his dad had a farm, a large farm flock of ewes. And we have many farm flocks in Missouri, and this was in the spring of the year, and he said I know one thing. I bet my dad's got more dead sheep than your dad has.

So I really -- I'm trying to think of what my zinger will be about comparing Missouri with Iowa and Kansas. I would address two issues very briefly regarding farm exports and agricultural exports. I would like to mention the impact and the fairness issue. I can talk in terms of percentages on exports and the importance of them to Missouri agriculture. In any given year, Missouri exports about 26 to 30 percent of the total product that's produced, and I think that pretty much mirrors the U.S. average, and the Secretary talked about that. Our domestic market is pretty much flat. The economists would call it a mature market, and so we simply have to look to global trade as a long-term and a short-term answer to some of our problems that we have.

And then in the fairness issue, I'm concerned about fairness, fairness for our Missouri farmers because we've seen our Missouri farmers and U.S. farmers readily adopt new technology. Some of the products of biotechnology have been readily accepted. I don't have to tell you that. I'm sure that's the case in Iowa and in Kansas as well. But I'm concerned, then, when the products -- when the farm product gets to the global market, we have some countries in the world who are bad-mouthing those products and insisting upon bans based upon fear mongering and not upon science. So I think we have to look to certainly to good science, and we need to insist on that as the Secretary and Ambassador Scher have done in this fairness issue. Someone mentioned, and I don't know whether it was the Secretary or the Ambassador mentioned 6 billion of the world's population is going to reach that, I believe you said, this fall. That's 96 percent of the world's population lives outside of the U.S. So I think that's another figure that tells us about the importance of access to those world markets. And when we look at it that way, you know, that's a sign, I guess, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If we can access the other 96 percent of the world's population, I think that's going to be certainly a very important leg of the stool that Secretary Glickman mentioned.

So for these reasons, the impact as well as the fairness issue, I continue to believe that the enhancement of current export activities and the development of new and emerging markets is one of the key components of the profit potential for agriculture regardless of whether we're from Missouri, Kansas, or Iowa or any of the states in this great nation.

Also I mentioned the fact that you all are here. I would commend everyone for your interest in this and certainly would thank our Missouri delegation, both the General Assembly members as well as officials and agribusiness people who have come here today to testify and be a part of this. So I thank you all.