117 



to how we might organize our assistance to the former Soviet 

 Union and Russia, and I would like to comment on those briefly. 



First I think these centers represent a real opportunity for estab- 

 lishing the extension service. We worked with local agricultural 

 schools, with local organizations, private farmers, and the agricul- 

 tural establishment, and with the academies of agricultural 

 sciences which have a lot of technology and have no history of try- 

 ing to apply that in the land-grant system way that we do in our 

 country, the problems of agriculture. 



The second point is that the firms that participated from the 

 United States side were very interested in following on, but there 

 is a lot of uncertainty about benefits to their firms. A policy that 

 would allow loan guarantees or some sort of Government participa- 

 tion for United States private sector involvement in Russia would 

 be very helpful in terms of transforming agriculture and very help- 

 ful in providing opportunities for United States agribusinesses 

 there. 



The last point is that the institutional setting is under significant 

 change, including the policy setting. There is just tremendous con- 

 fusion about what the course of the agricultural policy in the coun- 

 try should be, and I have visited with leaders at the farm level and 

 at the Government level about this problem, and they feel that 

 some kind of assistance would help them chart a course that could 

 be credible to the agricultural people and that could be consistently 

 followed would be a great assistance in the reforms. 



Thank you very much. 



[The prepared statement of Mr. Johnson appears at the conclu- 

 sion of the hearing.] 



Mr. Penny. Thank you. 



Mr. Burton Joseph. 



STATEMENT OF BURTON M. JOSEPH, PRESmENT, JOSEPH 



COMPANIES, INC. 



Mr. Joseph. Mr. Chairman, the Joseph Companies are our com- 

 panies — or are subsidiaries who have dealt directly with the Soviet 

 Union since 1963. Members of this committee in fact might remem- 

 ber that in November of 1963 a delegation of American grain ex- 

 ecutives, which I chaired, was invited to meet in Canada with the 

 chairman of Exportkleb, which is the Soviet grain export import 

 monopoly. We discussed at that time the lifting of the grain sales, 

 the embargo on grain sales from the United States to the Soviet 

 Union. My friend, Orville Freeman, who was then Secretary of Ag- 

 riculture and I met with President Kennedy then and the President 

 decided it was time to open trade between the two powers. 



Unfortunately, President Kennedy's death in late November 1963 

 delayed that decision until the spring of 1964 when President 

 Johnson decided to go forward. Since that opening, with the excep- 

 tion of the interruption during the earlv part of the Afghanistan 

 crisis, the United States has participated in the shipment of a sub- 

 stantial quantity of wheat, feed grains, and soybean meal to the 

 Soviet Union. These quantities represent about 50 percent of the 

 total of Soviet imports. 



On the average, the Soviets have imported between 30 million to 

 40 million tons of wheat and course grains each year during the 



