• Submitted by: manso
• United States
• Politics and Government
• 09 / 08 / 2010

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Sept. 6, 2010, 7:45PM. If you need a reason to support dropping the remaining ban against travel to Cuba by American tourists, Texas rice farmers and cattle ranchers are happy to oblige.

The state's farmers and ranchers have lined up in support of HR 4645, which supporters view as a kind of trade and travel twofer.

The bill would lift the last travel ban to theisland nation. Leaders of Texas agriculture are for it because they believe doing so would also open wide the door to more sales of agriculture products to Cuba, which has been mostly closed to U.S. products since the early 1960s.

Texas A&M economists have put a pencil to the numbers and they estimate passage of the bill would create 6,000 new jobs in this country's ag sector while boosting sales of agricultural products by about $365 million. A good chunk of that would benefit Texas.

How would it happen? The particulars were laid out by Bob Stallman, a Texas rice farmer and cattle producer who is president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Stallman served them up in a Chronicle Outlook piece in late July.

The farm bureau president says a lifting of the travel ban would create both a market for products such as Texas beef and rice (via more American tourists in Cuba with appetites for both foods) and a method for paying for it (the dollars they spend while visiting in that country).

That sounds like a win-win to us. Without getting bogged down in the endless argument over whether to continue economic sanctions against Castro to the bitter end, this much seems apparent. There's an opportunity here to do two things: to offer Americans expanded access to a country of great interest to so many for cultural and historic reasons; and a chance to help American farmers open up a new market.

As Stallman noted in his op-ed, polls show that more than two-thirds of Americans support ending the travel ban to Cuba. The added benefit of expanding markets for Texas rice and beef producers only strengthens the case for doing so.

We urge approval of HR 4645 to achieve this worthwhile objective.

Source: www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/7188965.html