09/29/06 Chatting with Valoria Part 2

Chatting with Valoria part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Yesterday we began a chat with Valoria Loveland the Director of the Washington State Department of Agriculture who was recently elected as the president of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture. With the 2007 Farm Bill on the horizon, Valoria said she was excited about working for all farmers & producers. Of course the other issue that is looming and in need of a fix is immigration. LOVELAND: I just signed a letter again asking Congress to move on a guest worker program and obviously to deal with border security issues but they need to move forward. This has been lasting way too long and the debate has been lasting way too long and not only agriculture up here in Washington but I talked to the director in California and they were experiencing labor shortages as well. We're quite dependent on a guest worker program and right now we don't have one. Everyone seems to have their own ideas of how to solve the immigration issue. So is the guest worker program the magic fix? LOVELAND: It's part of this whole debate that's going on. I think everyone recognize that a legal workforce from outside the country has been a tradition of the United States for far longer than I can remember. And what has happened over the last 20 or 30 years where we've not really paid as much attention as we should, we've allowed ourselves to get into a position where we don't have control of our borders; we don't know what people are moving back and forth and with peoples real and general concerns about border security, that needs to be addressed. But so does that need for the free flow of legal workers to and from their home country and we need that. While taking on a whole new set of responsibilities with the national position, Loveland isn't forgetting the Pacific Northwest. LOVELAND: I'll be traveling on a mission with Gov. Gregoire to Taiwan and South Korea and we'll be taking some producers with me. Beef, wine, apples, some food processing. And what we do when we go on these missions, the Governor and I along with our group that travels with us meet with the government officials, ministry of ag and their top officials and discuss with them issues around tariffs, trade barriers, quality issues and try to expand our market access in those countries. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.