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   The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Simmons). Under a previous order of the House, the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton) is recognized for 5 minutes.

   Mrs. CLAYTON. Mr. Speaker, on tomorrow we will have the Farm Security Act of 2001. It is our farm bill. It is our farm bill for the next 10 years.

   I want to tell the Members, food security is very important to this country. Indeed, we should protect the opportunities for our producers to produce, but also to make a decent living, so there is a vested interest in seeing that the farm bill is indeed enacted appropriately.

   Mr. Speaker, I rise to talk about the opportunity of making that farm bill even more responsive to a larger number of citizens who live in rural America. We have a title called Rural Development. It is a title that the committee itself had the foresight to include.

   It provides clean water and infrastructure for wastewater facilities. It provides economic development, and strategic planning so that small communities can come together and plan for their future. It also provides for additional resources in something we call value-added, where producers can add more profitability and add more processes right there at the local level, making more money for the raw commodities they produce.

   In order to provide more money for a larger number of people, we have to have something called shared sacrifice, meaning our farmers, who indeed need resources, must begin to see this as in their value, as well.

   So the amendment that I will propose does require a reduction of farm subsidies. It represents an addition of 2 percent overall to a reduction, which will give to these rural development activities $1.065 billion over the next 10 years.

   As I said, they will go for three important areas.

   First, $45 million a year will go for clean water and wastewater facilities, which rural communities desperately need. There is a report out now by the EPA which says that communities of 3,000 or a little better for the next 15 years would need $37 million just to speak to the deficiencies as they are now, not even to anticipate the things they may need to plan for, or plan for contingencies, given the new scare regarding water resources.

   In addition, as we look at the resources coming to rural communities, we know rural communities do not have the advantage of planning and coordinating or the staff capacity of writing grants so they can benefit. Most of the resources that come to rural communities come in the form of loans or guaranteed loans, so we do not have the community development funds as urban communities have. So the strategic planning part of it will allow a community to have that opportunity.

   Finally, as I stated, the value-added portion will simply add funds to our farmers' capacity to have long-term profitability of their raw products.

   Now, there will be those who say we should not take one dollar from the farmers whatsoever, but I would submit that I think farmers do care about clean water, I think farmers do care about economic development, I think farmers do care about value-added. These dollars are included for all rural communities. They are included for farmers, for their families, their neighbors, and their communities.

   So when we ask for the shared sacrifice, it is not as if we were saying that this will not benefit farmers. We are just recognizing that the crisis in rural communities includes the farmers, but it does not stop at the field. It includes the communities that are losing, because there is high-tech industry leaving the area. It includes the despair that out of 250 poorest counties, 244 of them are in rural communities.

   It does not ignore the fact that our census data show most of the young people are leaving rural communities. We are creating an almost irreversible gulf there. It means that if we are not careful, we are going to have this as a

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   So our attempt to put new resources in rural development is to acknowledge the crisis that exists in rural America. So I ask my colleagues as they consider the bill to understand that this resource will also be for farmers, it will be for their families, their neighbors, and their communities.

   I would think that most of the farmers that I know, when we explain it to them, they will say, well, we are willing to share for the benefit of all of us who live in rural communities, because we know in the long run, unless these communities are viable and sustainable, that they will not have the resources. Their taxes go up when they have to pay for water resources. They lose their most productive citizens when they have to go somewhere else to work, when we do not have the infrastructure or the digital divide being addressed.

   Those kinds of things add to the viability of the rural community, and farming is an essential part of it, but it is not the only part. So we want to make sure that our rural communities and our farmers will have an opportunity for a future. I just stress to my colleagues, they have an opportunity tomorrow, as we consider that amendment, to see the value of using that amendment to share with all.

   Finally, there are about 6.6 percent of our citizens who live on farms, and there are more than 94 percent in the rural communities that are non-farmworkers. So this is an opportunity to allow the farm bill, or an opportunity to provide some leadership on this and speak to the larger group of people who can be benefited.

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