Anti-Embargo Language Fails
In Ag Bill, Moving Separately

WASHINGTON —(AP)— Farm state lawmakers renewed efforts to ease the Cuban trade embargo, proposing to pass legislation as a separate bill that was dropped from the $69 billion agriculture spending bill.

The measure, which overwhelmingly passed the Senate but met with resistance from anti-Castro House members, would further lift trade sanctions by requiring a congressional okay for the president to use food, medicine or medical equipment in a trade embargo.

The bill's chief sponsor, Sen. John Ashcroft, said Senate leaders will allow a vote on the issue next week.

With world demand and commodity prices at historic lows, commodity groups are pressuring Congress to open world markets by reducing trade restrictions.

``It's estimated that sanctions cost the U.S. economy more than $20 billion each year,'' Sen. Chuck Hagel said. ``If a nation can't purchase products from the United States, other nations are more than ready to fill the needs of those markets.''

Unilateral sanctions against countries considered terrorist nations — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea — shut U.S. farmers out of markets worth an estimated $7.2 billion in 1997, said Sen. Pat Roberts.

``Food and medicine should not be used as a foreign policy weapon,'' Roberts said.

Roberts argued that the free-market farm reforms he authored in 1996, which increasingly are under fire with farm country mired in depression, will not work unless the United States gains ground in opening markets.

Republican leaders earlier stripped the sanctions language, along with new dairy-pricing rules, from a House-Senate conference committee on the spending for operations of the Agriculture Department.

Negotiators stopped work on the bill after Republican leaders refused to let them consider the Cuba provision. The leadership then coaxed a majority of the panel's members to endorse the bill individually.

For Republican Reps. Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri and George Nethercutt of Washington, who pushed the embargo language in the House, the maneuver still rankles.

``Fair has a new meaning in my vocabulary,'' said Emerson, who predicts the House will pass the measure if it goes to a vote.

Sen. Byron Dorgan said, ``We got stiff-armed in the conference committee.''

Emerson said rice producers in her southeast Missouri district suffered from trade embargoes on Cuba in 1962, Iraq in 1989 and Iran in 1995 because those countries were top buyers of U.S. rice.

Sanctions ``only end up pinching us, hurting our producers and hurting our country,'' Emerson said.

If embargoes were lifted this year, the National Association of Wheat Growers projects, U.S. wheat growers could export $500 million more of their crop.