Senator HODGES. The statement is occasionally made by somebody, particularly in the administration, I have often heard it made, that it is principally the young farmers who are having the trouble. My belief is that both in Arkansas and across the Nation it is farmers of all levels and all commodities who are in trouble; would you agree with this statement?

Mr. FLETCHER. Yes, sir. We have had older farmers and younger farmers who have quit, sold out. They have invested their entire lives and a lot of the old ones have been unable to replace their worn out equipment and have had to quit, and the young ones did not have the money to buy it with.

Senator HODGES. Thank you.

Senator Dole?

Senator DOLE. That was a very good statement. I have no questions. Senator HODGES. Thank you very much, your statement will be put in the record.*

Mr. FLETCHER. Thank you.

Senator HODGES. The next witness is Mr. John Ingram.

STATEMENT OF JOHN INGRAM, REPRESENTING SOUTHSIDE VIRGINIA NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION, CONSUMERS CONGRESS OF THE COMMONWEALTH, AND NATIONAL COALITION OF ECONOMIC JUSTICE, PETERSBURG, VA.

Mr. INGRAM. Mr. Chairperson and honorable members of the Senate Agriculture Committee, my name is John Adams Ingram. I was born in Roosevelt County, N. Mex., on April 30, 1944.

My father, Werle Faulkner Ingram, was born in Montgomery County, Ala., in 1907. His father, James Nelson Ingram, was a farmer. Besides owning land, he operated the general store and cotton gin in Hardaway, Ala. In 1910, my father's father died of failing business and failing health. My grandmother, Minnie Vesta Wall Ingram, later met and married a Texas sharecropper and moved to Dallas with five children. When my father was 16, he dropped out of the 10th grade to help his stepfather sharecrop through hard times. One year later, his mother died. By that time, the Ingram family was well separated from the farm.

During the 1920's, my father, who was 18, left Texas to join his brother, Herbert, in Chaves County, New Mexico, where they both worked a creamery. Later, in the 1930's, my father moved his family to Roosevelt County and ran a creamery until the middleman forced him out of business. In 1956 my father died of failing business and failing health. After that, my mother followed him to her grave. I and my youngest brother were separated from our sister and went to live with an older brother in Bernalillo County, N. Mex.

I graduated from high school and college in the 1960's. I also married and moved my wife, whose parents and grandparents were red dirt farmers and dust bowl refugees from the home State of Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie, Oklahoma, to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1967.

*See p. 412 for the prepared statement of Mr. Fletcher.

In 1973, the Southside Virginia Neighborhood Association (SVNA) convened to fight the war against high prices. SVNA is a volunteer coalition of individuals and organizations from Dinwiddie County, Petersburg, Ettrick, Hopewell, Colonial Heights, Prince George County, and Tidewater.

Our volunteers represent a broad cross-section of organizations including retired people's associations, organized labor, churches, civic associations, women's groups, consumers, youth, and environmentalists.

We began our work by circulating petitions first door to door, then throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, and finally nationwide. The petitions called for a roll back of prices of necessities to 1971 levels and controls over excessive profits: 60,000 signatures were collected in the Commonwealth. 1 million nationwide. SVNA formed the Consumers Congress of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the National Coalition for Economic Justice.

As chairperson of SVNA, I have never appeared before a Senate committee of this great Republic. I am proud to be here today and I hope you will listen to what I have to say.

As chairperson of SVNA, I am here to present the consumer's position on 100 percent parity for farmers and to request Senate action regarding this destruction of the American standard of living. I have attached additional material to my summary for your consideration and for the record.

Consumers have been fighting high prices since 1971, when thenPresident Nixon froze our wages. Working people watched helplessly as the cost of necessities soared out of sight. Even today the spiral continues at a 7 to 8 percent annual inflation rate.

Until cattlemen and consumers united in the great red meat boycott of 1972-73, many consumers blamed farmers for high prices for food. During the boycott, both discovered the middleman. Together we discovered food processors like General Mills, food distributors like Safeway, and we discovered the power of food monopolies that keep prices to the farmer below the cost of production and prices to the consumer above what is just.

Consumers understand that parity is basically simple; it means the prices farmers need to continue to farm should be equal to, one, their cost of production; two, the cost of living index, and three, a fair return on their investment to insure the survival of the family farm. By 5 to 1 the consumers support this basic demand of the American Agricultural Movement. As hard pressed as consumers are, they would be willing to see food prices rise 5 percent in order to achieve this goal.

Why is this so? We think it is because a majority of consumers can, like me, trace their "roots" to a family farm somewhere. Those who have lived on a farm know in their hearts what is happening.

We see television reports of farm auctions, of whole farm families being uprooted from the soil. We read about farmers being jobless and untrained for survival in the urban centers of our great Republic. Second, it is because consumers know where the majority of our food dollar goes. In 1977, consumers spent $180 billion on farmproduced food. Of that, farmers got $56 billion and middlemen got $124 billion.

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Third, it is because consumers know about the excessive profits these middlemen reap while blaming the farmer and inflation. For example, General Mills reported last December first-half profits at $88 million.

Consumers no longer blame farmers for high food prices. A majority continues to agree that middlemen are the ones who make most of the profits in food.

Consumers recognize the need for some kind of Senate investigation into the pricing of food between the farmer and the grocery store. Consumers would support any Senator who would initiate such an investigation. We believe such an investigation will document price fixing up and down the line of basic necessities such as food. We have long waged this kind of antimonopoly price-fixing fight. There was Bray v. Safeway in 1975, which documented price fixing and an award was made of $10 million. There is the pending Federal price fixing case against General Mills, which began on April 28, 1976; there was the Weyerhauser decision in 1977; and the recent Kodak decision.

However, something more immediate is needed. On the House side, H.R. 8359, an antitrust bill to allow injured persons, producers and consumers, to sue for damages from price fixing, has had several days of hearings. Consumers are aware that there is a similar bill on the Senate side. Consumers feel H.R. 8359 would effectively control price fixing while investigations are underway.

Before I close, let me leave this with you. As elected representatives of the people of this great Republic, the challenge facing you is great and dangerous with many pitfalls. The monopolies have all the money, all the lobbyists, and a powerful international organization of some 200 individuals from three continents, Western Europe, Japan, and North America.

We call them the Middleman's Monopoly Movement (MMM), you may know them as the Trilateral Commission. We have entered the North American membership and publications list into the record.

The Middleman's Monopoly Movement places economic stability before democracy as you will find in their publication, the Crisis of Democracy. They exert powerful political and economic control. It will take great courage and commonsense to investigate them.

It will take commonsense and courage to stop the destruction of the family farm and our standard of living, but you must save the family farmer, for he is the backbone of our great Republic.

You must save the family farmer for if he is forced off the land, the consumers would then be the pawns in a noncompetitive food system dominated by the monopolies.

Most of all, you must save the family farmer because the people of this great Republic ask it.

Listen to us, heed our words: A united alliance of consumers and farmers will not allow the middelmen to produce, process, and distribute our food. In the words of a young farmer, who is also a consumer, Harold E. Conover from Sussex County, Va., "The wind of unrest that today blows in from the plains and fields is only the first stirring of the storm that is to come."

Thank you.

Senator HODGES. Mr. Ingram, your attached documents will be put into the record.*

I would simply respond, there are two others in the Senate and perhaps some in the Congress, in the House. I was not elected, I was appointed, and I have only been here 75 days. I will only serve this year, but I have been involved in agriculture for approximately 11 years directly, and I am convinced more than ever before that most of the farm legislation is written by processors and it is inimicable to the best interests of the farmer.

A lot of this legislation serves and acts to keep prices low, which you might think would be in the interest of the consumer, but a startling statistic is the fact that since 1973, bread has increased 20 percent in price, and wheat is half.

Lower prices do not mean low prices to farmers, and do not mean lower prices to the consumers, but instead you have higher prices which never roll back and the farmer gets less.

I was in the cattle business and meat is just what it was in 1973 and those selling weaned calfs are getting about one-third of what they got then.

I think that is a terrible commentary on the economic system.

I do not know for certain what sort of legislation will come out. I am a cosponsor of a bill, Senate bill 2626, and I think it is a good longrange answer which provides protection. It sets up a board of governors for agricultural production which includes representation from consumers, and would hold public hearings before loan rates were set. If someone wants to come in and lobby for a certain loan rate and they are a processor, then they will be identified as a processor. The lobbying they do will not be done in these clubs or wherever it is done.

The one good thing is that finally I think farmers are coming here, realizing that their interest have not been protected in this legislation nor in Washington. That is my opinion, and I say that realizing that that is not a good thing for me to say.

National organizations that purport to represent the farmer, I am not certain have done so. I would be willing to argue or debate any of them, but the most dramatic proof that they have not been doing so is in the results.

Somebody in an earlier statement said that it is sad that the farmers who feed the Nation can't feed their own families. Anyone who has sat here for 10 days in these hearings will know and understand that is

true.

Those people at USDA that give us the statistics and those people in all these other offices that do so ignore their own strongest statistic, which is that there are 1,600 to 1,800 AAM strike offices.

The most passive people I know in our society, the farmers, are now up in arms. Regardless of what is quoted to the farmer is those statistics and theories somebody used to ask me why I didn't hunt more in the hunting season, I said, when they start taking ducks and quail on mortgages, I will hunt more ducks and quail.

I am sure the farmers will not find that their local banks or PCA's will take all these statements by USDA and this great weight of paper and apply it to their mortgages.

*See pp. 414-421 for the documents submitted by Mr. Ingram.

I have accused many farmers many times of being poor managers and not looking out after their own interest in the political round, and I am hopeful that they will slowly begin to look at both of those areas a lot closer.

Farmers still come before us, even in this committee, and don't include, when they talk about the cost of farming, anything other than their out-of-pocket expenses. You can't live that way. You have to depreciate your land, you have to depreciate your buildings, your equipment, and no one else runs their business that way.

As illustrated earlier by some Arkansas farmers, they had figured out what it cost them but did not take anything for their land. That is a great asset, the land. No one else does that. They lost money last year. Most farmers have lost money for a number of years and just really did not want to figure it up because they loved farming.

I am hopeful that economics will be looked at more closely by the farmers themselves, and they will never again turn their business over to someone else, nor assume that someone else is taking care of it. Others will not take care of the farmers' interests, but are taking care of their own interests. They are not the same. The processor and the farmer are competitors, and anybody who believes otherwise is fooling themselves.

With that sermon, I will close the record. I will stay and hear whatever you have to say at this time.

I will now recess the meeting.

[Whereupon, at 11:50 a.m., the committee recessed, to reconvene Friday, March 10, at 9 a.m., in room 322, Russell Senate Office Building.]