42 



could be a little better, but their heart is in the right place and I 

 think is beating pretty well. 



Mr. Penny. We have, I think, slated about 1,700 personnel over 

 the next 2 or 3 years that will be on the groimd in Russia and the 

 other Republics. Is that too much, too little, about the right size for 

 an exchange program of this sort? 



Mr. Severin. Russia is a big, big place, and I would say more 

 important than how many they are, that they be the right ones in 

 the right place. But it's a good ballpark figure, and I would cer- 

 tainly go out and try to find retired Extension Service people, re- 

 tired vocational agricultural people, retired home economists, re- 

 tired public health nurses, and young people who want to learn, 

 who want to serve. 



Mr. Penny. Mr. Allard. 



Mr. Allard. Thank you. 



Mr. Severin, you're talking about children's programs for the Re- 

 publics of the former Soviet Union. It seems to me like those are 

 value-added products. What can we do to make those more avail- 

 able? 



Mr. Severin. Finance them and get them there. Finance is al- 

 ways the bottom line. 



Mr. Allard. But we do provide dollars for food for hunger and 

 these other programs. Are you saying we don't have enough, or is 

 it just a matter of redirecting some of the dollars that are already 

 there? 



Mr. Severin. That would be my opinion, to redirect some of the 

 dollars that are already there. In so doing, it would help to encour- 

 age production on Russian farms of the basic products that they 

 can produce. They're great producers of bread grains. We all know 

 about Turkey red wheat, we all know about Shishkin's lovely paint- 

 ing of rye. They're great producers of bread grains. Other things, 

 they cannot produce. But I would suggest that we could do better 

 simply by reallocation of what we are allocating. 



Mr. Allard. How do we determine which value-added products 

 we send over there? Do we open this up to a bid process? Somehow 

 or the other, as you mentioned earlier in your comments, we have 

 to be sensitive to the needs of the Russian people back in the Re- 

 publics, at least, so how do we make — we have sort of a bridge 

 there. We have areas here where we have plenty of surpluses, but 

 not where their needs are in the Russigm Republics. So how are we 

 going to bridge this with our value-added products? 



Mr. Severin. I would simply go back and talk with a lot of the 

 experts and specialists who went there last year from our country. 

 Maybe they had not had previous experience in that country. But 

 they're nutritional experts, they're health specialists. They went 

 under AID programs of one kind or another, and I know some of 

 the young fellows that I met there last year — met them there — 

 they're Ainericans. The/re Americsin pediatricians. I would draw 

 on the experience that we gained last year, and there are other 

 people here in our country who are knowledgeable simply from the 

 Russian literature. 



Mr. Allard. So you're saying that they can help us identify 

 areas where they need value-added products, and once that's been 



