-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.larouchepub.com/eir_talks/eir_talks_981202.html December 2, 1998 EIR Talks Interviewer: Tony Papert Guests: EIR Economics Editor Marcia Baker, Food for Peace organizer Michele Steinberg, Russian Schiller Institute head Prof. Taras Muranivsky, South Dakota Food for Peace activist Ron Wieczorek, and former Nebraska Democratic Congressional candidate Don Eret. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- "EIR Talks" can now be heard on the Internet. Tune in on the EIR website, www.larouchepub.com. On Sundays, "EIR Talks" airs on shortwave, on WWCR, at 5 PM Eastern, at frequency 12.160 megahertz. On Saturdays, "EIR Talks" airs on satellite at 5 PM Eastern, on G-7, Transponder 14, 91 Degrees West. For further details call Frank Bell, 703-777-9451, ext. 252. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Tony Papert: Is Clinton up this week or down? How are the Republicans maneuvering? Forget it. It's a dumb show for your entertainment. Ken Starr is a traitor, but he's not Bill Clinton's biggest problem. Bill Clinton's biggest problem is that he doesn't know diddly about economics. And that's your biggest problem, too. At this moment, the American President should be leading the world out of an unfolding global financial collapse, which is right now threatening millions around the world with starvation. It's not just the worst financial collapse in five centuries, it's a civilizational collapse. If we let it continue, whole nations will go out of existence, the great majority of their inhabitants dying out, leaving only a few million illiterate savages, especially in North America and Western Europe. In his ignorance of economics, President Clinton is joining with the IMF, with the leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, and Britain's Tony Blair, to make "feel-good" statements about how the crisis is under control. This refusal to face reality, is not leadership, it's public relations hype, and it's making things disastrously worse. Around the world, some leaders are ignoring this hype. They know the crisis is getting worse, they're resisting the IMF's proposals, and saying "We will do whatever we need to do, to defend ourselves, to ensure that our nations survive, and to feed our people." What will America say to these leaders? There can only be one answer: "We will immediately help you feed your people, and we will help you defend your sovereignty, just as we would have you defend ours. And together we will combine to rebuild a just world monetary system." The only moral answer can be some version of the Food for Peace plan that Lyndon LaRouche forcefully proposed just a decade ago, in 1988. Lyndon LaRouche: Around this world, as most of you know, a condition exists and will worsen over the coming 12 months, which amounts to hearing a particular section of the Lord's Prayer, coming from the developing nations, from the poor of Eastern Europe, from the poor, the tens of millions of poor in our own country: "Give us this day our daily bread." The question is: Who is going to answer that prayer? Papert: Welcome to "EIR Talks." This is Tony Papert. It's December 2, 1998, and with me in the studio today, is EIR economics editor Marcia Baker, and well-known Food for Peace organizer Michele Steinberg. In 1988, knowing that the East Bloc or the Communist Bloc was about to break up, LaRouche made a proposal for an East-West strategic partnership based on Food for Peace. And we'll see some documentation of what he presented at that time. This was a path not taken. Instead, U.S. President Bush, British Prime Minister Thatcher, French President Mitterrand, engaged on a path using so-called free market methods, to ensure that the Soviet Union would be destroyed, and would never arise again as a great power. Now, in the midst of today's catastrophe, ten years later, the opportunity, the path not taken offered by LaRouche in 1988, is opening up again. We'll pursue more in-depth later in the show, current actions by world leaders Jiang Zemin of China, also Primakov of Russia, the Japanese government, which are again, for the last time, opening the opportunity for the kind of proposals LaRouche made a decade ago. The question before us is: What will America do? Will it work with these nations, which are trying to defend their peoples for a new world economic order, or will the whole show go down in chaos? Now, as I said, Marcia Baker, economics editor of EIR, is with us, and at the beginning, she's going to begin outline the world food crisis as it exists today. Marcia Baker: Well, I think the best way to put this into focus, is to picture two things in your mind. On the one hand, in the United States, in states like Nebraska, the Dakotas, Washington, you have piles of unsold grain backing up--wheat, corn, and other things, lying on the ground, no markets for it. Then you know you have, in North Korea, starving orphans, a whole generation needing food. Food needs in Africa, in Russia, and so forth. So, here you have two scenes. Senator Byron Dorgan said earlier this year, he thinks there's a "disconnect" if we have surplus food here that's going nowhere, and people starving abroad. Well, another name for "disconnect," is the markets are blown. The system of markets and market forces, and all of this mythology, is gone. Aspects of the food chain--production, distribution, and processing all around the world, are breaking down. This is it. Now, let's look at the dimensions of what I'm talking about, once you have this picture in your mind. If you picture a map of the entire world, you have 35 nations that have shortfalls of food. Now, this number I don't just make up. This was given by the United Nations Organization in Rome, it's called the Food and Agriculture Organization, and they keep a tally. And these 35 nations you see in Africa, South America, Central America, their populations total 750 million people. Now, all of them may not be short of food. But in the countries in which these souls live, there's not enough food for everyone. Who's going to eat, who isn't going to eat, is a question. Naturally, we know--take Central America. You had the storm, Mitch. So Honduras, Nicaragua, they need food. You understand that, and so forth. But this isn't just simultaneous acts of Mother Nature around the world. This is a systemic breakdown in economies, in which it's most intensely expressed in lack of food. Let's look at the map again. And let's visualize a map of one strategic place we want to focus on: Russia. A vast land, a rich land in resources, and so forth, with 147 million people. They had more. In recent years, they've been losing population. And they are on the world map of food-short nations. Why? Well, one thing is, this summer of 1998, in their crop season in the northern latitude, they had drought in the spring, and they had rains during the harvest--practically unprecedented weather. But that's just the immediate cause of their shortfall. They had a grain harvest this year, by the way, of something like 43 million tons, when last year--1997--it was 88 million tons. And in previous years, during the 1980s Soviet period, with all its problems, they had 100 million tons. So they have less than half of the grain this year. But that's not the whole story. In the recent years of the 90s, during the so-called market era that they had to adjust to in the West, after the Soviet bloc broke up, their agriculture productive sector, their output fell by 36 percent. Look at it in terms of livestock this year: the sheer numbers of their meat animals, that you eat. Poultry went down over 30 percent in seven years. The numbers of birds and geese, ducks, so forth. Hogs went down by over 30 percent. Cattle went down by close to 40 percent. And the nation became import-dependent, especially for chicken quarters. You know, those frozen things. It started when George Bush was president, and now they're called "Bush legs," those frozen chicken quarters, not drumsticks in Russia. Because it's a sign of ridicule that they were forced to become import-dependent. But as the financial crash came in '97-98, in August 17th, after the ruble was devalued and so forth, the imports stopped. So they're short of food. This is the situation. Michele Steinberg: Marcia, with this financial crisis, this money crisis and not enough food, some countries have to do something. What has the United States done? Baker: Well, I'll tell you. In November, the United States did announce a food aid program. It was agreed to, Moscow and Washington, that by July of 1999, some three million tons of grain's going to be shipped over, a million and a half tons of wheat, and so forth. Then, a week or so later, the European Union said they'd send something. But, this is like a bridge. And Moscow said we need about four and a half million tons by July, but we want to rebuild our agriculture. And that's the issue. Will the United States go for that, which is the traditional food for peace policy from the 1940s and 50s? People should eat, and economies should be built up, ours, theirs. That's the basis of foreign policy. That's the open question right now. One thing we have to discuss this, is a firsthand report from Moscow on this situation in Russia. Because you're getting a lot of false propaganda from the kind of food commodities profiteers, who want to make money off helping someone, like Cargill, Continental, Tysons, Unilever, Nestle's, we could name names, that "Oh gee, people are starving, pay us--the fox--to feed them, the chickens." Forget it. No more status quo ante on these Bush legs. Moscow said no. But we're going to have a firsthand report in Russia, because it's particular. There's 12 million people in the Far North of the map of Russia, because that's near the Arctic, that need food in a special way. Or the drought areas, like the Lower Volga. So, with us on the phone, we have Professor Taras Muranivsky from Moscow. And he's the head of the Schiller Institute of Russia, and he's written on economic policies associated with circulating the book in Russian by Lyndon LaRouche, "So, You Wish to Know All About Economics?" And he writes frequently in the Economics Gazette, a prestigious policy journal in Russia, in which Taras Muranivsky has made known the ideas of LaRouche. Of course, LaRouche has visited there. So this is a fighting issue, and he's going to speak to us now on that. Hello, Professor Muranivsky. We are live now, connected to you. You're in Moscow. And I'd like to start the first question. Are you there? Prof. Taras Muranivsky: Yes. Baker: Would you give us a firsthand picture, an overview on Russia, and the food supply situation, 'cause there's a lot of false publicity, I understand, in the West, to say it's bad in order to attack the government. Would you fill us in? Muranivsky: I would say that the situation in Russia, is not good right now. It is not good not only this year, but during the last five or six years. And I can say that the Russian crisis, is a crisis that began in 1991. From then on, Russian governments followed the International Monetary Fund's prescriptions for deregulation and free trade. Thus, the West is co-responsible for Russia's crisis, having passed this policy for Russia to become mainly a raw-materials exporting country, and no longer an agro-industrial power. Russian industry has been crushed down to 30 percent of its 1991 production levels. With such areas as textile and food industry that are unable to generate domestic credit for the productive sector, the Russian government sold its debts to foreign creditors at higher and higher interest rates, with ever shorter maturities until there was a partial default on the state debt on August 17th, a freeze on the payment of Russian domestic-issued bonds. I can say, that in this connection, many people in the West and in Russia say that Russia is heading for famine and destitution. But I can say, in spite of all, Russia is not heading for famine and destitution. And the new Russian government, I can say that it is the very first serious government from the beginning of the 90s, thinking in such a way as to implement some measures to prevent such awful things. We can say that the situation is awful in general. But some people in Russia, who were against the Primakov government, and who tried to remove it, by trying to to show the very, very awful picture in Russia. But I can say that if the West seriously, not as a declaration, will help Russia a little bit with products, et cetera, it will be better for us. I think that Lyndon LaRouche's proposition about the Food for Peace, is a very good one. And we can say that it is necessary to, in the nearest future, build in Russia good infrastructure, the same thing that Russia declares, not one time. Because the territory of Russia is so large, food products are often in the wrong location. A good part of the excellent fish, the catch, is thrown away, because their capacities to ship have been taken down. Russia is increasingly dependent on imported food, which compared poorly with home-grown products on the consumer market. Where domestically products--meat might sell at 1.51 [check this number] per kilogram, the imports from Europe go for $4.00 per kilogram. The Russian reporters who are reporting about the specter of famine in Russia, are not economic reporters, but political. And they are motivated by political hostility to the Primakov government, as I said. It is possible for the situation to improve before these journalists see the famine they are hoping for. A typical situation in Russian regional towns, can be shown how the people reserve some food for winter. They prepare everything. For example, they prepare tomatoes, different fruits and vegetables for winter, maybe sometimes prepare potatoes, meal, sugar, et cetera. But there are some regions in Russia, especially in the Far East and the North, where they have some additional difficulties, because it is connected with the shipment of different coal, oil, and other products, which naturally for the electrical station, and for other purposes. I think that in general, if our government will take measures, we'll do everything. Today, for example, Primakov has given a speech in the Upper Chamber of our parliament. And he called to the regional governors, to join their forces, in order to organize, to supplement these regions with the necessary food, and other necessary production. And it was met very well in Parliament, and I hope that when we will support this government, everything will be okay. But, as I told you, some politicians, especially some of the so-called right forces, or, as they call themselves, "democrats," tried to prevent it. And they are interested in making everything worse, in order to remove this government, and go back. Maybe that's all for now. Baker: Professor Muranivsky, thank you very much for this firsthand account, and good luck on your good work. Now, what specifically has Russia said it's going to do, in terms of what the Moscow government said? Well, they made it clear over October and November of 1998, nobody could be in doubt. And this was Prime Minister Primakov, Agriculture Minister Semyonov; this was the food commissioner, who's a deputy vice minister or premier, Kulik. Here's the one-two-three kind of thing. They have rescheduled and put off farm- and food-connected debt for five or ten years, to keep everyone in agriculture working. They have said we're going to prioritize rebuilding our grain production; more fertilizer inputs per acre, we want to have, and other inputs. Machinery. They're in discussions with John Deere. We want to increase the number of livestock as rapidly as we can. Now, you do that with the small animals first. You only need a pound or two of feed, you get a pound or two of chicken flesh. So they want to build up their poultry first. They have empty pens and facilities. They also want to accept emergency humanitarian food aid, especially places like Kamchatka Peninsula, or the far North. And finally--and this happened in November, when President Jiang Zemin went to visit Russia, in Moscow, and then he went to New Siberia, Novosibirsk, and gave a speech--they want to develop, collaboratively, infrastructure--including in places like Siberia, the Far North, to have a tremendous food output potential, so they'll be food-self-sufficient. This is what they have said, and this is what's on the table that they want help to do. Steinberg: These ideas didn't come from nowhere. This is exactly what Mr. LaRouche has been in dialogue with many Soviet leaders, and then Russian leaders, especially through the work of the Schiller Institute in Moscow. But even earlier, ten years ago, in 1988, when Food for Peace was founded, the principle was a collaboration between the two superpowers. Not as welfare, not as delivery of food simply, but along the lines of the old idea. You can give a hungry person a fish. That takes care of a temporary problem. But give him a fishing pole, and the means to fish, and you have a future. This is what Lyn, speaking as a U.S. presidential candidate, offered to the Soviet leadership in 1988. He told them: "If you don't listen to me, you will not survive." He was right. He did it in peace. He extended the olive branch. Let us go now, to look at the tape of that historic press conference in West Berlin, Germany. It was a time when Germany was still divided. In the shadow of the Berlin Wall, Lyndon LaRouche offered collaboration between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. LaRouche: Under the proper conditions, many today will agree, that the time has come for early steps toward the reunification of Germany, with the obvious prospect that Berlin might resume its role as the nation's capital. For the United States, as for Germans and Europe generally, the question is, will this reunification process be brought about by assimilating the Federal Republic into the East Bloc's economy, or economic range of influence, or can it be accomplished in a different way? In other words, is a united Germany to come into being as a part of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, as President De Gaulle proposed, or, as Mr. Gorbachov has desired, a Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic? I see the possibility that the process of unification could occur precisely as De Gaulle proposed. I base this possibility on the reality of a terrible, worldwide food crisis, which has erupted during the past several months, and which will dominate the world's politics in every part of the world, for at lest two years to come. The economy of the Soviet Bloc itself, is a terrible and worsening failure. In Western European culture, we have demonstrated that the successes of nations, of big industries, depends upon the technologically progressive, independent farmer, and what is called here in Germany, the Mittelstand. Soviet culture, in its present form, is not capable of applying this lesson. Despite all attempts at structural reform, and despite any amount of credit supplied by the foolish West, the Soviet Bloc economy as a whole, has reached a critical point. At its present time, in its present form, it will continue to slide downhill from hereon, even if the present worldwide food crisis had not come into being. We say to Moscow, "We will help you. We shall act to establish Food for Peace agreements, among the international community, with the included goal that neither the people of the Soviet Union, nor the developing nations, shall go hungry. "In response to our good faith in doing that for you, let us do something which will set an example of what could be done to help solve the economic crisis throughout the Soviet bloc generally. "Let us say that the United States and Western Europe will cooperate to accomplish the successful rebuilding of the economy of Poland. There will be no interference with the political system of government in Poland, but only a kind of Marshall Plan aid, to rebuild Poland's industry and agriculture." If Germany agrees to this, let a process aimed at the reunification of Germany's economies begin. And let this process, leading toward reunification, be the punctum saliens for Western cooperation in assisting the rebuilding of the economy of Poland. We in the United States and Germany, should say to the Soviet bloc: let us show you what we can do for the peoples o Eastern Europe by this test in Poland, which costs you really nothing, let you discover, and judge by the results, whether this is the lesson you wish to try in other cases. Baker: So, what LaRouche proposed, of course, didn't happen. It was not done. He proposed this collaboration you just heard for Poland, for all of East Europe, Ukraine, Russia, the rest of the world. That would have been a traditional Food for Peace approach of building nations, creating prosperity. We would be in a different place right now, no food shortages, but abundance. But instead, the 1990s were marked by the era of so-called free trade. Russia had to accommodate to that, became food-import-dependent, were looted. Even Russian tractors, tractors made in Belarus, were sold in Wisconsin for pennies, as to what they ought to really cost. The place was looted. So, instead of building up national economies, you've had a taking-down. And let's get physical about this. Let's look at the total world grain picture, over the last 20 years, especially the last seven years. Papert: We'll be back in just a moment. [commercial break.] Papert: Welcome back to today's special edition of "EIR Talks" on Food For Peace. Baker: You've had about 1.9 billion tons of grain produced in all the world. That's rice, corn, wheat, and so forth. LaRouche said in October 1998, let's go over 2 billion. Let's produce 2.4 billion. I heard the rest of that speech. And in fact, to have a decent diet, we should be producing 3 billion tons in the world, reharness the Dakotas and elsewhere. But in fact, the graph shows that we weren't producing more. It's a stable line, which means there's less food per family, per nation. There's less fertilizer applied per unit area, less output--not just food--less output of economic inputs of all kinds. Less output of machinery, less output of chemicals needed in the agriculture cycle and other cycles of production. So there's been a levelling down. The food crisis shows we're below breakeven on general economic activity, in terms of physical inputs and outputs that people need to survive. Ah! But what did you hear during this period? We didn't hear that kind of thing I just said. You heard "Oh, you don't need to produce more food. We'll just have just-in-time delivery of food. No one should have any food reserves." Right now, as of October or Winter 1998-1999, Brazil, that used to have about 4 million tons of reserve of corn, 3 million tons reserve of rice, they have no reserve at all. Mexico not only has no reserve, they have been made so import-dependent on the United States and elsewhere, that they have malnutrition. They needed 15 million imported tons of corn and wheat for tortillas in the calendar year 1998. That's a record. So, during the 90s, you had what? In 1995, you had World Trade Organization, an outgrowth of the GATT. You had NAFTA in 1993-94. So you had all these free trade agreements that depressed and suppressed production, and you didn't have any expansion. Who made anything off of it? It wasn't free trade. That's the publicity name. It was rigged trade--by a certain number of international commodities cartel companies, both in fuels, precious metals, minerals, foods, you name it. Mostly connected to the City of London. Not the English people, but the kind of British financial circles, Commonwealth circles. And those names are Cargill, Continental; they now want to merge and become One Big One. Tyson's, IBP, and all the other famous names: Nestle's, Unilever, Kraft, Philip Morris. That's the picture of where we stand, and that's the picture of Russia saying we're going to get out of this, we're going to rebuild our own sovereign agriculture. Steinberg: It's not just Russia that needs to be concerned. Where Russia was in 1998, is where the United States is today. Look at the economic situation. We just heard, in the last 48 hours, because of the mergers, because of the collapse, the systemic global collapse of the economy, that America is going to lose 40,000 jobs in airplane production; 20,000 jobs in oil production, due to the merger of Exxon and Mobil. Five thousand banking jobs. America is facing an existential crisis, and the question is will America take the path not taken in 1988 with LaRouche's Food for Peace? The time is now. We can do it. It's all there. International leaders who are against free trade, have invited the United States in. Back in October, the end of October, Lyndon LaRouche wrote a revolutionary piece, called "It's Food, Not Money, That is the Crisis," in which he addressed the Russian crisis and the Russian solution. That is what steps could be taken to get the United States out of the depression. We can not have leaders who are morally indifferent to the kind of starvation that has gone on today. Marcia, you know the steps that Russia needs to take, according to Lyndon LaRouche, and the United States. Let's hear about that. MARCIA BAKER; Yes. In fact, I'll tell you, all along, in the 1990s, we've publicized what ought to be done In 1994, we put out an Executive Intelligence Review feature story, that said "Shock therapy ravages Russian food production," or "ravages Russian agriculture.' All of the documentation. The mysterious, superstitious side of things--this isn't physical economy. It's all this free markets/ globaloney/globalization free trade stuff. In fact, in the American tradition, we don't have to even re-invent the wheel to deal with things today. Go back to the original Food for Peace period of the 1940s and 1950s, and we have all the policy precedents that we need to follow today. I'll run them down. Just take three. 1941: That's when the Lend-Lease program was put into place. And it continued throughout the war. Under that, the production of milk powder, edible oils, grain, meal--you name it--butter, anything that was needed, was commissioned, the farmers were supported. Committees on the state level decided how to do it. The War Mobilization Board cooperated, and it was done. The milk powder was used domestically for civilians, the military, and to whatever designation abroad needed it. That was how you do things. You decide who needs to eat, how much they need, and go for it. That was discontinue after the war. But 1949 was the Agriculture Adjustment Act, and that act is what's called the Parity Law. It's a standing law. In fact, dump the 1996 free trade law domestic farm bill in the United States, and it says within it, then you revert to the 1949 Parity Law. That's said for a whole list of commodities. You can look it up. Milk, hogs, sugar beets, you name it. There was a floor price or a fair return price of parity price designated. That lasted through the 50s and so forth, until it was discontinued. But 1954, you had the Food For Peace law. That's Public Law 480. It was called Agriculture, Trade and Development Act. and that had in it the idea, support your own domestic economy, to have surplus and food reserve capacity, so that you can have it at home and abroad. But back the economic development of other nations. There it all is. Now, if you take that in contemporary terms: what do we need to do now, '98, '99, and the year 2000, and do it fast? For Russia, you do the kind of thing to back what the government of Russia has said they want: three points LaRouche stressed in this paper, "It's Food, Not Money, that's the Issue." Number one: economic physical development increase, have that, of inputs and outputs per capita. And that has different sub-categories, you can imagine what they are: industry, agriculture, machine tools, infrastructure, and also, what you could call natural monopolies. They should run their whole train system, the Trans-Siberian and new ones, their oil and gas, coal, all that kind of thing. And finally, the Arctic North. It's like the Sahara used to be. Let's go develop those deserts, the Gobi Desert, even the Arabian Desert. These are the challenges for mankind, that Far North Siberian area. You can grow things there. That's what should be done. And secondly, no globalization, no free trade, dump all that. And thirdly, go for collaborative development of these infrastructure projects. That's what you need in Russia. Now, the United States--what should we do here? Well, it's the things that made sense in the 1940s-50s way that at least things worked. Dump all that free trade, World Trade Organization treaty, the NAFTA, the Canadian-U.S. Free Trade Treaty. Don't just blockade things at the border. Dump the whole thinking that was behind allowing that kind of free trade anyway, that Cargill and so forth is taking advantage of everyone. Dump all that. Instead, have nation-to-nation agreements, including financial agreements, where you peg currencies, because, you know, in agriculture, Mother Nature doesn't speculate every day. You have cycles of crops per season. And in fact, it takes 20 years, no matter what, for a really good dairy herd. So you need 10-, 20-year credits. So between nations, have mutual arrangements like that. Back Russia with 10- and 20-year credits. That's in the small print of the P.L. 480 Food For Peace law, that kind of stuff. Okay, go for that. And that means the cartels are out of the picture. Don't let them unlicensed, unbridled right to cross your borders. Make your own national interest measures, and have national interest trade. Then domestically, what do you do in the United States? Reintroduce parity pricing. It can be decided, especially if Lyndon LaRouche is the economic adviser at the White House and available to Congress and to states, but go in--either have the 1949 law with current adjustments come back and forth, or mandate another form of floor pricing, parity pricing, whatever you want to call it. That's essential. Simultaneously, it can be decreed, as it was in the early part of the Clinton administration by Mike Espy, who then was targetted for phony corruption charges--Mike Espy declared a 30- to 60-day debt moratorium on farmers for no foreclosures, when he went up in the Dakotas. Do that nationally. No one should be put off the farm, just like no one should be put out of their house or apartment on the street in this crisis. Get that going. Low-interest credits need to be advanced, so that you can increase production of the different kinds that you need. Restart a lot of dairy farms. And along with that, reemployment. Get the infrastructure projects going, especially water projects: levees, new water supplies, the North American water and power lines that were shelved for 20 years, because we have tremendous unemployed, and we need advance tech employment in the machine tool sector, and so forth. Harness that. If we do this, if we have this kind of listing--and you can add other specifics--this is the traditional Food for Peace policy domestic side, that goes with the international Food for Peace policy we must have strategically to back Russia. And it can be for all parts of the world. Look if you have wheat sitting on the ground in Nebraska, you have a million tons that's out there in temporary storage. Get it going somewhere, and get more in the pipeline, or next year it's gone. Now you see it, now you don't. Steinberg: So we are one bad harvest year away from famine in America and around the world. This is a crisis that has been invisible, as we hear about record rates of high prices on the stock market, and meanwhile, our food production is being destroyed. We have no food reserves. And I have on the line today, two experts on the food crisis, two farmers who are also leaders in the Food for Peace movement, founded by Lyndon LaRouche and Helga LaRouche ten years ago. These experts are leaders in their community. They have run for office. We have Ron Wieczorek from Mount Vernon, South Dakota, and Don Eret from Lincoln, Nebraska, and we'll be hearing from them in a few moments. Nothing can save this situation, except a revolutionary change in policy. And here in the United States, we have launched a petition drive, an appeal to President Clinton: correct the economic policies Return to the American System, and bring in Lyndon LaRouche, statesman, economist, renowned international figure, as your economic adviser. Already, 51,000 Americans as of Thanksgiving have signed this appeal to President Clinton. Included among them, are hundreds of state representatives, former Congressmen, who understand we have one last chance to make this change in policy. This chance is now. Earlier this year, Ron Wieczorek and Don Eret ran for political office. And at that time, members of the United States Senate from the farm states, held hearings. And at that time, they sounded an alarm--not as strong as it needs to be sounded. But this is what they said: "Across the northern tier of the country, there has been a disaster. The prices between 1996 and 1997, had fallen drastically. Farm income had bottomed out. It's even worse since then." Ron Wieczorek and Don Eret will tell us something about today's crisis in America. But this is what the Senate told us in June of 1998. Washington state: minus 20 percent in farm income in one year. Idaho, minus 17 percent; North Dakota, negative 98 percent; South Dakota, minus 17 percent; Nebraska, minus 20 percent; Minnesota dropped 38 percent in one year. Wisconsin, where dairy had to been as hard-hit as other places, itself has dropped 38 percent. And the prices are even worse. When these figures were given, the price of hogs per pound was 45 cents. This year, the price per pound of a hog is 18 cents. There will be thousands of farmers not farming next year. Ron Wieczorek, when you started your campaign, you compared your farm prices, to those that your father, and other farmers, had gotten in South Dakota in 1948. How did this happen, and what do these figures mean? Ron Wieczorek: Well, the commodity prices, the farm commodity prices of 1948 were the effect of FDR's federal farm policies of parity pricing. Tariffs and duties, national currencies pegged at fix rates, the Marshall Plan process, the Lend-Lease Program, a process by which we could feed the starving people of the word; this parity pricing system--you know, it's a national political policy that we need to change the system. That was what was used in the period of the '40s. To prevent the United States of America from going bankrupt in a time of war. And this parity pricing system short-circuited the need for debt and the usury system. So, this, again, it's a political process that will change this thing. Again, we can look at what happened in, you know, the Ezra Taft Benson era, when people looked at consumer purchasing power, you know, had to be expanded by scaling back parity pricing--the same free trade myth that is used today, to move our productive sector to the least cost-producing area of the world. This was a national policy. This is the national policy that's got us into this problem. We have to get back to, as Lyn has said over and over, an American System, a political-economic system that will revive the economy of America and the world. Steinberg: Ron, there are reports that grain is piled up on baseball fields, and standing out in the open, while hungry people are starving in Indonesia, North Korea, etc. Have you seen this in South Dakota? Wieczorek: Yes, there's massive piles. Probably this is the worst I've ever seen it, you know, for an overflow of grain. We have the benefits of the Horn of Plenty, which have been turned into a detriment here in America. The American farmer should be guaranteed the American market at a fair price. They should have first crack at the American markets. The surplus should be with a political program, a national political program, be bought up, like the P.L. 480 program, a McGovern's Food for Peace program in the '60s, that helped provide the government--or the government purchased food at a fair price, and distributed it to the starving people of India, and the rest of the world. We need a similar action today. Today, we've got our farmers hooked here, hogs at $15.00 per hundredweight market, losing $60 per head. These people have turned to credit card debt as a mechanism of support--high-interest credit card debt, to maintain their farming operations. Steinberg: That is unbelievable! Wieczorek: We have, you know, suicide hotlines opened up all over the state. Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the fastest-growing city in the nation, has opened up a suicide hotline. Pierre, South Dakota, the capital of the state, has a suicide hotline, because of this lunacy brought about by a national policy of free trade. Steinberg: Don, you're seeing a similar thing in Nebraska. And when you ran for U.S. Congress, it was directly to stop your opponent Bereuter's insistence not to send food to the starving in North Korea. Now, you held hearings in Nebraska to warn people about this, and to pose a solution. Do you see anything that the United States government can do along the lines that Mr. LaRouche is talking about, to get us out of this disaster? Don Eret: Well, yes. And having received nearly 48,000 votes in this recent congressional election, I'm encouraged to continue to pursue the principles of the Food for Peace organization that I've participated with, since its founding in September of 1988. The current farm crisis is caused by the extremely low prices formed by the speculative short-selling on the futures trading exchanges. These same trading tactics that were used to take down the currencies of Malaysia and Indonesia, are what takes down farm prices to the producers. If I were in Congress, I would address this problem by filing of two bills. First, I would ban hedge funds and commodity pools from trading in agricultural commodities and products. And the other bill, would be to revise the Commodity Exchange Act's confidentiality clause, to require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to identify the four largest buyers and the four largest sellers in each traded issue, whose trading positions are reported on a weekly basis. In a farm crisis hearing that I held in Lincoln on August 18th, as part of my campaign, I presented an analysis of how the cattle market is repeatedly manipulated by trading activities of the largest traders. And we had charts to bear that out. Steinberg: Well, I think we will have an opportunity to present that material to Congress on December 16th, Don, when Senator Lugar will head up the Agriculture Committee hearings. And it will be precisely on hedge funds, and the role of the CFTC. We need to get LaRouche's economics through. You in the farm states are crucial to this, and we look forward to collaborating on this testimony on Dec. 16. Baker: See, this is a unique opportunity--epic, historic. Because it's not even an option. Baby boomers think you have choices--forget it. It's either you go with this development, or it's chaos. And fortunately, in the world, there are foreign governments, there are leaders who are already moving for development. So this is the hope and the opportunity. And most of this has been blacked out. I'll tell you. As the year ended in 1998, you had many historic things--monumental--and they were blacked out. I'll give you an example. You had President Jiang Zemin of China going to Moscow, to meet with President Yeltsin. And then he went on to the Gateway--it's like the equivalent of St. Louis, only it's higher-tech--to Siberia, called Novosibirsk, "New Siberia," which is near the Ob River and near the Trans-Siberian Railroad. And President Jiang Zemin gave a speech, November 24th. And he's an electrical engineer, and he spoke to colleagues in China and in Russia, and around the world, that we can go into the new century, no matter what the problems--and they are acute--with new advances of the mind. And if we have education, and we back infrastructure, and we back applications, it will be okay. Then, at the same time, in November, new arrangements were discussed between Japan and China, for--guess what?--working directly on corridors of development from Europe to Asia, including things like oil, fiberoptics, as well as railways. So there's concrete infrastructure projects. And this is exactly what's meant by LaRouche's metaphor, "Food, Not Money," meaning the means to food, the means to existence. So you have these developments. Besides in East Asia, you have Dr. Mahathir Mohamed, the president of Malaysia, saying "George Soros and the speculators, be gone! We're taking measures to build our economy." September 1st, 1998, they took measures to control against speculation, and so forth. So, you have real commitments to infrastructure and development, and you have also the direct attack against the parasite of real physical economy, which is speculation and money going into usury and free trade, rigged trade, and so forth. Now, even more, in October, there was an historic meeting in Beijing and other cities, that are the eastern end of this Europe to Asia Land-Bridge. Because if you take the coast of the Gulf of China, the China Sea, and then you go westward, all the way across China; the dry interior, then into Central Asia, and then across Russia, Eastern Asia, and so forth, you end up in Frankfort, you end in Rotterdam. There's already a fiberoptic cable strung from Frankfort all the way to Beijing--17,000 kilometers. It was just opened up this fall. Did the United States population, or the Canadian population, hear about it? No. Because there's a blackout. But in fact, this is the reality that we can move towards. And in agriculture, then everything flows from that. Agriculture, like machine tools, inventions of the mind, has what's been the whole history of agriculture. Not accidentally having manna from heaven, it's a creative thing. So that in fact, what lies before us now, we can take-- You know, you can take the satellites, our new commitment to space. We've seen John Glenn up there measuring things. You can take geopositioning readings, and in your tractor, say in Argentina, or in the great Chernozem region of Russia, which is the best black earth--it makes Iowa look sandy--and you can take your tractor, and you can measure by the foot, what fertilizer is needed, what isn't needed. You can farm by the foot. That could be done. That's the kind of thing: we can have fun opening new dams, and expanding agriculture with precision farming like this, or with protected agriculture, as they have in China. They have more plastic cover over area of fields in China, than anywhere in the world, in order to keep the moisture and temperature. There's no problem with technology and food production, especially in the lower latitudes for super-rice. We have miracle rice number two, called super-rice. All we have to do is apply it. Papert: Which will it be? Continue the alliance with Tony Blair and Al Gore, and enter a Twenty-First Century of barbarism and depopulation, as we see in Africa today, parts of Ibero-America, parts of Russia; or will it be alliance with the new trends in Russia, in China, a partnership for world development in the Twenty-First Century, centered around the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which Marcia just described. The choice is up to you. You've been listening to "EIR Talks," a special edition, "Food For Peace," thank you very much. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. 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