Four funerals and a wedding.

• Author: Dorgan, Byron L.
• Position: Sen. Dorgan - Bryan Dorgan discusses population loss in Great Plains states - Brief Article

My home county in Hedinger County, N.D., had 5,000 people when I left. Now it has 3,000. It is a plum to a prune, just shrinking and shrinking, as are other rural counties throughout the United States. If you take a map and color in red all of the counties that lost more than 10 percent of their population in the last 25 years, you have the shape of an egg between North Dakota and Texas. It is not just our problem in North Dakota. It's Montana's problem, Wyoming's problem, South Dakota's, Kansas's, Oklahoma's.

So my proposition: Don't we have to work on this together as a matter of national policy? The answer is yes. And that's why I included money in two separate appropriations bills over the past two years to provide funding for the Great Plains Population Symposium Project. Let's get some of the best thinkers in the country to focus on what kind of economy we want in rural America. What are the policy choices that get us there?

I happen to believe that you must have a decent farm bill. Forty percent of North Dakota's economy is agriculture. If you don't have a decent farm bill supporting family farms, it's very hard to build an economy that works well. And to those who say farmers must become more efficient, I say nonsense. Our farmers are the most efficient in the world; they're just getting sucked under by terrible trade bills and a collapsing grain market. Transportation, the grain trade, and chemical companies that are virtual or near monopolies have far more market power than do family farms. And we have to do something about that.

It's interesting to me that this country is not only dropping bombs in Afghanistan, we are dropping food. All of us understand that farm states produce something vital to our nation's security. The production of food is a national security issue in my judgment. Europe does it in a way that distributes production among family enterprises. Europeans know what's at stake; they have been hungry before and don't want to be again. Part of food security is maintaining a broad network of family producers.

So, too, should it be in this country. The easiest place to inject bioterrorism is into the large agro-factories where you have several hundred animals congregated in one place. So I think for a range of purposes, including national security, we ought to promote family farming.

Having said that, let me say it again: The reason I appropriated money and advocated a population symposium is because I believe the...