36 



Do we have any of those programs out there? Ms. Brookins, 

 maybe you want to start off, the programs that you are not using 

 at all. 



Ms. Brookins. We work closely with the Department and have 

 to many times reprocess or repackage the information that comes 

 out. I just recently chaired a meeting in Asia, in Singapore, of 21 

 countries, the Food and Agriculture Industry Forum for the Pacific 

 Rim. And lo and behold, this is an example, I discovered that there 

 is a lot of information from, let's say, ERS coming out on countries 

 and on specific market or commodity developments and everything, 

 in countries that are on a data base that none of the commercial 

 or business people in the whole room from the United States even 

 knew existed. 



Mr. Allard. I see. 



Ms. BROOKINS. That is one good example of information that may 

 be very good, but is not readily available or is not in the form that 

 people could use. So I think what we need to be looking at is this 

 volume of information that is produced by ERS, by FAS, by people 

 out in the field, much of it extremely high quality, and see how we 

 can better coordinate that information and work with the commer- 

 cial sector and say what do you need? Do you need this or do you 

 need that? 



And as I said, we have to be very careful because we can't short- 

 change smaller companies. We can't shortchange farmers in terms 

 of their access to this. Larger companies have their own battalions 

 of lawyers to deal with customs regulations, they have their own 

 battalion of analysts to find out what is going on in offices around 

 the world. So we have to be sure if we are changing the way we 

 put together our information, that we make it available so that 

 smaller farmers and smaller exporters can have access. 



Mr. Allard. I would assume that if you weren't aware of this, 

 there is probably a lot of economic development agencies within 

 States that are trying to get into the international trade that prob- 

 ably aren't aware of this information either. 



Ms. BROOKINS. I would imagine you are absolutely right, sir, yes. 



Mr. Allard. Mr. Bovee. 



Mr. Bovee. I don't really have any comment to make on that. I 

 guess the one issue that I would continue to address are issues 

 that come out of the GSM-102 program, areas in which we are 

 having discussions, and as Mr. Goldthwait mentioned, yesterday 

 we had a meeting of banks involved, both foreign banks, U.S. 

 banks, as well as exporters, to discuss a number of areas in which 

 we can work to hopefully make those programs more flexible, more 

 user friendly, and try to get the trend that we have seen in the last 

 couple of years, i.e., a decline in utilization of those programs for 

 exports, pick up again. 



Mr. Allard. Can you share those areas with this subcommittee 

 that you talked about that they need to be improved upon so that 

 you can better utilize them? 



Mr. Bovee. Some of the things that Chris already mentioned 

 previously, looking at different programs, shorter terms that may 

 or may not be accommodated by the current regulations. I believe 

 a number of the issues that we discussed yesterday as to how to 

 utilize the programs can be accomplished with the current regula- 



