Ill 



thing that we are adding a lot more emphasis on because of their 

 interest in this subject. 



Mr. Barlow. Do you think our food aid could be developed in 

 conjunction with soil conservation outreach? 



Mr. Evans. You mean a linkage between the two? 



Mr. Barlow. Not linkage so much as the two of them going 

 hand-in-hand. 



Mr. Evans. I think that there are msuiy things that we can do 

 over there, and we can do a lot of them through technical assist- 

 ance, and as I say in my testimony, I think there needs to be a 

 linkage between that and some capital, and the food assistance is 

 one way to provide the capital like we did in Poland and that 

 worked very well. 



Mr. Barlow. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 



Mr. Penny. Cooper, you didn't respond to Mr. Stenholm's ques- 

 tion about food or grain sales to Russia and whether that impedes 

 indigenous production within Russia and the other Republics? 

 What is your sense of the appropriate policy of the United 

 States 



Mr. Evans. I think it could. You know, under the Communist 

 system, there weren't any complaints like this. There were no com- 

 plaints. It doesn't take you — ^you don't have to be a private farmer 

 very long before you become sensitive to imports, right? We under- 

 stand that extremely well, and, no, I don't think we have done any 

 great damage particularly in the last several years or — but there 

 is a feeling of resentment if we overdo it and we just got to be kind 

 of careful, I think. 



Mr. Penny. How do you feel about the alternate approach of 

 monetizing commodities in the local market? The argument has 

 been made that we could better target our food distribution if we 

 were to essentially take finished products into local regions where 

 there is a demand for that particular good, whether it is a proc- 

 essed meat or dairy products or flour, whatever it might be, and 

 then use the money, locally monetize it, use the money locally to 

 support some of these agricultural reforms or other free market re- 

 forms. 



Mr. Evans. I think there is a lot of merit in that. The people that 

 need to be targeted, if you are going to target of course, are the el- 

 derly, the retired, and those on fixed incomes. They find it very 

 hard to meet the rising costs of food. Of course it is not easy to tar- 

 get those people. It is not easy to get — it is a tremendous adminis- 

 trative task to do that and so I am not sure of the feasibility of it. 



But the idea of monetizing it in modest amounts at least and 

 using it for seed capital, we very strongly support. 



Mr. Penny. To the point of targeting the aid, Keith Severin sug- 

 gested to us yesterday that we — the most effective way in his judg- 

 ment to target food assistance would be sort of an international 

 WIC program where we take certain commodities and distribute 

 them at the elementary school and day care center levels, that you 

 have a distribution point and it is highly targeted on vulnerable 

 families. 



Is that a more manageable approach? Because I know the struc- 

 ture over there is problematic. Is this an approach that might be 

 workable? 



