51 



Mr. BAUERLE. Okay. Thank you. 



My name is Mike Bauerle. I am an agricultural producer. I live 

 in western Nebraska and operate a farm on my own. For the last 

 5, going on 6 years, I have served on the Nebraska Corn Board, the 

 corn check-off board, and that represents 32,000 corn producers in 

 the State of Nebraska. 



Many of these producers in the last 6 months to a year have ex- 

 pressed the same frustration as the chairman did in his opening re- 

 marks concerning the rhetoric, the extreme exaggerations on both 

 sides of this issue. 



The Nebraska Corn Board got caught up in it, also, and 6 

 months ago decided to take a unique approach to this. We commis- 

 sioned the University of Nebraska Agricultural Econ. Department 

 to take an analytical, well-disciplined approach and look at every 

 study of NAFTA that is out there. 



We released this study last week in Nebraska and yesterday in 

 Washington, DC, and that will be part of the record. 4 



This is a two-part study. First, they started with 84 different ar- 

 ticles, studies, completely — everything they could get their hands 

 on concerning NAFTA. They weeded it down to 40, basically throw- 

 ing out those that had no economic justification, no data. Of those 

 40, 10 economists then went to work using the same criteria to 

 analyze those 40 as to their validity, if they used similar methods, 

 and gave us a one- to two-page synthesis of each one of those re- 

 ports. You will find that in the back half of the report that we have 

 just issued. 



To complete the second half— I might add, too, that the charge 

 we gave to them was not to give us any predetermined results. We 

 wanted to know for the best interests of those corn producers that 

 we are representing what the best guess of the outcome of NAFTA 

 would be. At that point, they went to work using a RUPRI model. 

 RUPRI is a model for Rural Policy Research Institute, which is a 

 multistate model that was set up between the States of Nebraska, 

 Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa to predict how public policy affects 

 rural people. It also consists of an econometric model. 



They took the synthesis of all those 40 results and placed it into 

 that economic model, and I will give you a very brief synopsis of 

 what we found when that model was completed. 



For the United States, it shows a positive growth in GDP — small 

 but positive, with ranges from 0.02 to 1.34 percent. It shows ex- 

 ports in agriculture increasing. It shows that the big winners in ag- 

 riculture would be corn, as we have talked about, wheat, coarse 

 grains, oilseeds, meat and livestock products. 



Several of the studies indicated that grain and oilseed sectors 

 would be the biggest beneficiaries under this NAFTA agreement. 



It showed that U.S. corn exports to Mexico would increase in a 

 range from 44 percent to 244 percent with the successful conclusion 

 to the NAFTA agreement. This is at the end of the phase-in period. 



For Nebraska, what it showed was a 5- to 9-cent increase in the 

 price of corn. As a corn producer in Nebraska, if we can get a 5- 

 to 9-percent increase in the price of corn, we are going to push for 

 it. 



* The study is retained in the committee file. 



