CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -- SENATE

November 22, 1967

Page 33687

FARMERS HOME ADMINISTRATION COMBATS POVERTY IN MAINE

Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, one of the most effective lines of direct action in the war on poverty is the program of small loans to rural families who ask only for a chance to work and earn their way.

Rural Americans boxed in by poverty frequently have little to hope for except a better opportunity for self-employment. Industrial and business jobs they can perform may be scarce or nonexistent in their rural communities. The farm, or some small non-farm enterprise, offers their best hope for a decent living.

The rural American caught in these circumstances can never make a start as an independent entrepreneur unless he can obtain tools, supplies and a place to work. He has no savings, nor extra income or conventional credit for staking himself to what it takes for a beginning.

This is the need fulfilled by economic opportunity loans administered in rural areas by the Farmers Home Administration for the Office of Economic Opportunity.

We have far to go before we reach all the people we must among the 15 million disadvantaged in rural America. However, this program has reached more than 52,000 low income rural families since it began in January 1965.

Individual loans not exceeding $3,500 each have been made to 44,500 families, to help them make a better living on small farms or go into nonagricultural enterprises that can yield them a better living in their home communities.

Families served through the economic opportunity loan program have taken up and made a success of more than 350 different types of occupations.

Groups of low income people, totaling another 7,500 families, have formed cooperatives to acquire and operate expensive farm machinery that no one family can afford, or supply other goods, services, and working facilities the members can use in order to earn a better family income.

There are numerous examples I could cite of the successes individuals have made with economic opportunity loans, but permit me to give this example of a lobster fisherman in Penobscot, Maine. Married, with two teenage children, he had worked as a share fisherman for 37 years, using another man's gear for 25 percent of the net profit and eking out a bare living of about $2,000 a year.

In 1965 this fisherman qualified for a $2,500 economic opportunity loan from the Farmers Home Administration to get his own lobster boat, small truck, and other equipment. Now, as an independent lobster fisherman, he can net more in 6 months than he did working on shares the entire year. Last year he earned about $4,500 or more than $2,500 above what he earned the year before.

This is but one example of some 300 loans to fishermen in the coastal areas of the State, and 1,000 loans in rural Maine that have enabled low income families to make immediate headway with loans that have given people the opportunity to do so.

Mr. President, every family who is able to start moving through this program may be subtracted from the distress rolls of rural America.