MR. POMPELLI: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and it's nice to see some familiar faces and lot of new ones. I hope today that you all on the panel find this session fairly interesting and that all the others also provide some information and insights that you will be able to take with you when you leave this domestic setting and kind of hear from the choir and go out in the international arena and try to apply that. I know it's pretty tough. As introduced I'm Greg Pompelli from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And also a member of ST Southern Regional Project looking for effective ag trade on the southeastern agriculture.

What I'm doing today is presenting, I guess, in some ways you heard sole you heard from the soybeans, you heard from the forestry folks and so forth here from many other industries. What I'm going to provide is something of, I guess, a background of the choir because this is the survey that we did in Tennessee basically in April. We asked about 40 of our state leaders in terms of agriculture, ag commodities everything from beekeeping to vegetables livestock and so forth, we asked them to address the issues of what concerns them about trade and also the upcoming trade negotiations. Every state in the southeastern region has conducted the same study. I'm sure at some point you will see the result of this as well. This is basically just going to cover the Tennessee perspective. How different that is from Mississippi, South Carolina or other states, I'm not quite sure but I wouldn't expect it to be too different. It's pretty much the same.

I would like to use most of my time to summarize the results rather than giving percentages and so forth about what we found, just the key points, and then take one or two minutes to summarize and make a couple of statements or give some thoughts about suggestions about how your offices might move to mitigate some of the concerns that we have in Tennessee expressed. As I said we had about 40 leaders consent to a survey. This survey was developed by -- the survey was developed by the ST 287 group. A list of leaders was contacted and was taken from the U.S. Department of Agriculture list of ag leaders which includes commodities, business and so forth. From that I narrowed it down to that 40 and in some ways I was hoping that we caught everybody, but certainly there ought to be folks out there that we missed for whatever reason. Out of those 40 we had about 17 respond, which in my line of work is healthy. You might want to see 100 percent come back on something like this. I can understand that. We asked a number of questions that were fairly direct and we also had the open-ended questions and asked for fairly short terms getting about 50 percent which is a pretty nice response as far as I'm concerned. Now, when we asked them to identify the trading concerns that affected U.S. agriculture, that's U.S. agriculture, not just Tennessee agriculture, we gave them a fairly long list or laundry list to select from. Basically it fell into three categories and oddly enough, maybe not so oddly, you all had done a lot of background work. But the and probably the most important was the issue of international market access. So any number of things could have fallen underneath this, but as a large category demand and market access were primary. Certainly going through the Asian crisis and watching commodity prices fall has made much more for much sense (inaudible) strong export market.

The second area are the trade relations with our NAFTA partners and potential for the expansion of related agreements such as the FFA. In this case you all are working with the WTO. It is not quite the same but certainly that stands out because with Tennessee's geographic location and so forth, we're very big trade with Mexico, Canada. So any kind of growth in that area there the changes are certainly important to us.

Finally, the third area even though it may not come out as number one, it's very important and it's this issue about concerns about the WTO dispute resolution process. Not so much just how it's going to take place, but how in some cases those findings are then implemented. I will mention a couple of things here about the FFA because that was something that was on their minds. Although it may not be something that the WTO issue coming up are addressing, certainly they're related.

Again, market access. In this case protection policies and in some other cases unfair government support. What they perceive is unfair government support for producers in other nations. Those things remain a critical issue. When we think about what we specifically look at as an argument, not an argument, but a discussion on developed nations in terms of primary areas of trade. We think about things like free trade agreement. We're looking more at developing nations an that interaction there is a little bit of a clash especially with southern agriculture because in some way we have a lot more at stake and a lot more overlap in some of those commodities. Then also included in this set of concerns what we call, what I called competitive production concerns based basically on uneven application of environmental phytosanitary and sanitary and the biotechnology standards. Again, there was some sense that what was good for the United States grower was not necessarily going to be applied to other growers in developing nations. We move forward and ask them directly about the WTO and its upcoming round. Oddly enough, not too big a surprise, market access, dispute resolution the application of the environmental and biotechnical standards.

And finally one that was very well described. In fact, they were all interesting, but one that stood out for me was that there was a general concern about the treatment of agricultural interests in these trade negotiations.

And clearly agriculture is moving its way to the forefront but we prepare these type of commerce and trade which is a small sector which often times is not (inaudible) clearly. When you look at that and try to summarize it a little bit we had a number of leaders raise this issue about market access to farmers. Basically they didn't want anything more than that on the playing field. At least in so many terms that's the way it was brought out. As leaders one of the things they understood was the importance of trade but they also recognized the need to communicate annual effects of the trade negotiations to those members of their association. That's one of the toughest things to do. We can talk in theory how well that helps producers and consumers around the world, but it doesn't necessarily help domestic prices and I think that's something that needs to be addressed in many cases.

Again, the market access issue reviewed positively open on both sides reducing our tariffs what little we had left but it had to be done in a measurable and a practical setting terms. I think that is something that I hope to see.

Again, let's go back and kind of close with this issue in terms of our findings. This issue of awareness of agriculture at WTO that has to be made more clear. That has to be more (inaudible). Since ag has been overlooked over the years, there are really significant concerns among a lot of our leaders in the state. So by closing I would say maybe two or three suggestions. One, demonstrate the ability to set a fairly strict, tight negotiating agenda through these kinds of meetings but also further into other communities. We want to see reduced trade barriers. We want to see those markets open. Those are important, but it has to be demonstrated in some way that is practicable and measurable. A second part would be the issue of really some sense creating confidence in the WTO. I think that as an institution is somewhat lacking. Recognizing certain economic needs that haven't necessarily been (inaudible) some of our ag businesses and associations.

And finally, it's tied closely with these the two, work hard to reduce some of uncertainty with relationship to phytosanitary and biotechnology standards and those applications. I think it's interesting to see the reactions of our folks here today but they're very closely aligned with what we see in Tennessee in terms of views. They're fairly representative and with that I will close.

MR. SCHUMACHER: Will you be making your summary available to us also?

MR. POMPELLI: I have the original and we also have it on the web University of Tennessee.

MR. SCHUMACHER: I believe, Earl, if I am correct, Catherine, all the comments will be on the web site as well.

MS. CORNELIUS: That's correct.

MR. SCHUMACHER: Your statements will not only be recorded but they will be put on the web site. If we had a digital camera, we would take pictures of them as well. We can do that. We have a person here on digital camera. But we will be having all of your comments and if you want to see yourself or your comments on the web, be careful what you say.

MR. CUMMINGS: If I could make a comment about concerns about agriculture not being properly included or its importance properly considered in upcoming talks. I don't think it's an overstatement when I say that building agriculture is at the heart of our agenda. When the Uruguay Round was finished, we realized that the job wasn't done and that's why we provided the Uruguay Round agreement that there would be a beginning of new negotiations in agriculture in 1999. We're following up on that as well. Also, at least from the USTR's standpoint, there has been a considerable emphasis on putting more resources into agriculture both at the staff level and also the political level.We have for a time a trade negotiator. For example, I know that with rank of ambassador and I know Gus has been very insistent that we work very closely with the department also with the State Department so that agriculture is not ignored and it deserves the proper and gets the proper attention (inaudible.). I would like to leave you with that thought.