4/4/01 Regarding your OpEd about "What If…" It’s obvious that you are the one who needs a history lesson, not me. You ask, for example, "What if the industry would have invoked a marketing order in 1997, 1998, 1999…"

Remember the CMC meeting of August 25, 1997. You were there along with every other handler. I, as a member of the CMC, asked for supply and demand information from the handlers so that the CMC could benefit from this information as we considered appropriate action, given the dire predictions of a mounting surplus being made at the time. I asked you and the other handlers specifically how the CMC should analyze inventory figures and what these figures mean in terms of supply and demand. This was a rare meeting where every handler was in attendance. The CMC needed guidance, from large handlers in particular.

The chairman asked for a response. You and Tom Bullock, sat mute like two surplus-building peas in a pod. The chairman then recessed the meeting. A modest regulation at that time or the following year would have sent the right message to the growers, the handlers and the trade. You and Tom Bullock were missing in action. Now that we have lost control of the surplus, you want a radical regulation that disrupts the market and damages smaller handlers.

Let’s turn the clock back to late 1996-early 1997. Remember when Ocean Spray foolishly went off the market with berries and concentrate claiming the record-breaking crop of 1996 left them short? Remember what you did?

You, Mr. Swendrowski, stuck it to the trade by jacking the price of concentrate from $80/gal. to $150/gal. You were selling frozen juice berries for $195/bbl.

As a result, the trade imported several hundred thousand barrels of wild berries from Russia and Scandinavia, reduced the amount of berries in their products, used other commodities as cranberry substitute, and in many cases just stopped selling cranberry.

I don’t need a lecture about orderly markets from a price-gouger who helped take this industry down. Is it any wonder that the trade is showing us no mercy now that things have gone the other way?

You want those of us with no surplus to be regulated by 50% so that you can once again go for the big score.

Sorry, John. Been there, done that. YOU CAN’T BE TRUSTED.

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