Needed: A Farm Disaster
CHRISTENSON, REO M.
CONGRESS' HALF-WAY MEASURES ARE NOT ENOUGH Needed: A Farm Disaster By Reo M. Christenson Following in the path of its predecessors, the 87th Congress has passed another half-way farm bill...
...Still, perhaps Secretary Freeman should have known that he was too far ahead of his time when he asked Congress to confess its inadequacies publicly...
...or if not, by permitting farmers to qualify for very modest supports if they comply with such acreage cutbacks as might prove necessary to reach the 80million-acre goal...
...Congress, of course, was affronted by such a realistic appraisal of its incapacities...
...In choosing a compromise plan carefully calculated not to give offense in any quarter, Congress has insured that the farm dilemma will still be with us next time around...
...In addition, the fact is that the farmer dislikes direct subsidies, preferring instead the less conspicuous variety which are found in price supports...
...While Congress has already evidenced some interest in a rural retraining program, it is not at all interested in adding two million persons to the urban working force at a time when unemployment continues to be distressingly high and the economy appears unable to absorb the normal additions to the labor force...
...CONGRESS' HALF-WAY MEASURES ARE NOT ENOUGH Needed: A Farm Disaster By Reo M. Christenson Following in the path of its predecessors, the 87th Congress has passed another half-way farm bill which no one really cares for or expects to work...
...At best, Congress can play a vitally important negative role when the Executive has failed to think things through, or has misjudged the national temper...
...As in the case of Freeman, the legislators went half-way with his recommendations, reducing price guarantees on many commodities and eliminating acreage controls on feed grains...
...Another argument against the Bureau's proposal is that it might well involve a permanent annual expenditure of $2 billion a year, while creating a sizable class of exfarmers who live off their retirement checks...
...Yet it is apparent that when potent regional pressures conflict with the national welfare Congress is organically incapable of constructing legislation which charts a clear and consistent course...
...What hopes, then, are there for an effective farm bill in the future...
...Rather than choose between the plans offered by Orville Freeman, Ezra Taft Benson, Charles F. Brannan, the Farm Bureau or the Committee on Economic Development (CED), it has rejected them all in favor of an inbetween course which muddles together some stringent controls, some voluntary controls, some land retirement, some direct subsidy payments, and sundry miscellaneous provisions...
...The Bureau's plan would retire some 80 million acres of farm land by competitive bids, if possible...
...It would reduce the need for production controls, give the consumer the best buys for his money, obviate the necessity for costly export subsidies, enable the textile manufacturer to buy raw cotton at the same price as his foreign competitors, and prevent the accumulation of appalling surplus stockpiles...
...Yet when it came to feed grains, the most troublesome surplus of all, the voluntary program was left relatively unchanged...
...At least one Congressional faction, the Southerners, are not much interested after having suffered a disillusioning experience with the soil bank in 195657...
...For all the farmer's grumpiness about controls, there is no doubt whatever that in a showdown he prefers them to a sharp slash in income...
...Although this is shocking to those who misunderstand the essence of democratic government, and who have failed to reckon with the limited (though indispensable) role which legislatures can play in modern times, it is the direction in which all effective democratic governments are moving...
...Thus, for reasons of varying merit, Congress chooses to try none of these plans on a sufficient scale to prove, once and for all, whether or not they will work...
...What about the Farm Bureau's solution to American agricultural troubles...
...The measure which was finally passed calls for an extension of the current program of voluntary production controls for feed grains, and is modified by a provision which permits Secretary of Agriculture Freeman to offer producers a choice, in 1964, between tough production controls and sharply lowered price supports...
...In Britain, after taking careful soundings of interested parties, the Cabinet can draft a bill and push it through Parliament, except under the most extraordinary conditions...
...Not a drought, for that would probably only perpetuate the illusion that more sweeping legislation is not needed...
...In their place he suggested substituting the free market but cushioning its impact by paying the farmer a direct check for the difference between the market price and a "fair" price...
...In the same way, Congress would rather aid the farmer by a consumer penalty than by direct appropriations, whereas the direct payments-free market option would do exactly the opposite...
...It is an old sad story, but things simply have to get worse before they can get better...
...Concluding that overproduction was a permanent phenomenon which could only be solved by drastic measures, he proposed stern production curbs which the farmer could reject by referendum if he preferred the perils of a free market...
...The reasons were many...
...In recent years, though, Congress has paid little attention to the Farm Bureau program...
...The latest Committee on Economic Development farm program was announced too late for legislative consideration this session, though Congress would not have bought it anyway...
...Feed grains controls, for example, were felt to be a threat to the Southern livestock industry, so Southern Democrats defected to Halleck's troops in substantial numbers...
...As it is, Congress annually approves direct payments for wool and sugar beets without any fuss, and in this year's bill it agreed to supplement wheat and feed grain price supports with modest direct payments to farmers who reduce their acreage...
...This prescription, which has probably commanded more support from agricultural economists over the years than any other, may still be the most sensible of all...
...Finally, the farmers have shown themselves mildly hostile to land retirement...
...The result is that Congress has now come up with a conservation reserve program which retires nearly 30 million acres of unproductive land-meeting the Bureau program, as it meets the others, something less than halfway...
...What is needed is a crop, or a succession of crops, which carry the national stockpile to such absurd dimensions that even Congress will recognize it must accept Executive leadership...
...For the present, the only real hope for the farm problem seems to lie in a disaster...
...Drifting along with temporizing measures, it seems, is politically less hazardous than a serious attempt to deal with the problem...
...Again, Congress had its reasons...
...With the Democrats in control, the legislature fancied itself the champion of the farmer, and had no intention of permitting farm income to drop by one-third, which agricultural economists almost unanimously agreed would happen if the free market were invoked...
...During the Truman Administration, too, the "Brannan Plan" became a Mephistophelian term...
...Led by their implacable Minority Leader, Charles Halleck of Indiana, House Republicans marshaled a solid front against the "regimentation" involved in the bill...
...Thus, the inertia which helped prevent Congress from accepting any of the other alternatives is at work here, too...
...It also balked at bringing other supports down to the point where the free market was given a fair trial...
...Most of its time is now spent denouncing the sinfulness of centralized government and lauding laissez-faire fundamentalism...
...Although the Freeman Plan promised savings of $1 billion a year, and the Secretary himself gave one of the most effective demonstrations of Executive lobbying Congress has ever seen, the House turned it down cold...
...Another possibility open to the 87th Congress was some variation on the Brannan Plan...
...In the Congressional and popular mind it was associated with all the dank and sinister forces which inhabit the nether worlds-and it still retains this aroma...
...Only the Executive branch has the potential perspective, unity and discipline to analyze a problem of the complexity of U.S...
...Dedication to nostalgia at the Bureau has in fact become so intense that Congressmen, a practical-minded lot who are notoriously impatient with preachers, are often either bored or irritated with Bureau spokesmen...
...Moreover, it enables the Administration to cut back wheat acreage from 55 million to 48 million acres, while discouraging more intensive cultivation of small acreage by limiting price supports of $2 a bushel to wheat used for domestic food and export...
...Curiously, the 87th resisted Freeman's proposal just as earlier Congresses had resisted Ezra Taft Benson's reverse formula for eight consecutive years...
...As for the program itself, it, too, has run into obstacles...
...The legislature blanches, however, at the thought of extending the principle on a comprehensive basis...
...If a large enough acreage is retired, the Bureau believes, supply and demand could be brought into balance at prices fair to farmers without resorting to mandatory controls...
...The CED would have the Government terminate price supports over a five-year transitional period and undertake a major technical education program to facilitate the movement of some two million farm workers into the cities in that period...
...Other Republicans were able to enjoy the privilege of extolling freedom for the farmer principally because they knew they would not have to live with its consequences...
...At that time the idling of millions of acres of Southern land produced severe economic distress in the small towns which depend for their living on farm purchases of machinery, fertilizer, seeds, gasoline, etc...
...Although the United States has over $7 billion of surplus commodities in warehouses - which costs nearly $1 billion a year more for storage and handling - and spends the phenomenal sum of over $6 billion on the annual agricultural budget, Congress did not feel that sense of crisis which alone seems to goad it into effective action...
...The Bureau, which worked hand in glove with Benson during his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, has fallen into the hands of a group of rather shrill Right-wing evangelists...
...There was considerable speculation that the curbs the Secretary had in mind were so rigorous they jeopardized affirmative referendum results, but at least his proposals represented a courageous effort to meet the problem head-on rather than merely toy with it...
...Benson, who hated controls and farm subsidies with a passion only thinly concealed by the need to prevent complete panic among rural Republican Congressmen, worked with religious fervor to eliminate all but "disaster" price supports...
...Before the 87th Congress, Secretary Freeman had marked out a bold plan for solving the farm problem...
...This accorded with long-established Republican agricultural conservatism, which this year was bolstered by grass-roots evidence that the farmers were less than enthusiastic about the Freeman Plan...
...Other wheat will receive support at a considerably reduced level...
...It insisted, however, on retaining price supports for com at levels which kept the farmer tolerably happy...
...Republican Congressmen from rural areas frequently agreed with the Democrats...
...If the income-support goal was reduced well below its author's original proposal, and if an individual payments ceiling was set at a reasonable level, the cost of the Brannan Plan could be kept to acceptable dimensions...
...As President Truman's Secretary of Agriculture, in 1949 Charles Brannan wanted to abandon price supports for a number of commodities...
...Nor are Congressmen persuaded that agricultural overproduction would end if the more efficient farmers took over the land now being farmed by the less efficient...
...Reo M. Christenson, a new contributor, is Associate Professor of Government at Miami University...
...And it refuses to adopt any combination of these proposals which is radical enough to stand a chance of succeeding...
...The long run may be a long way off, but Secretary Freeman had his eye on the historical trend last year when he proposed that the Department of Agriculture draft farm legislation, subject only to Congressional veto within a 60-day period...
...However illusory the feeling may be, these make him feel less "dependent" on the Government...
...agriculture and emerge with proposals which are balanced in terms of national interest...
...The usual sectional rivalries that complicate the passage of any farm bill split Democratic ranks asunder...
...In addition to bushel quotas for wheat, Freeman's program called for stiff controls on feed grains and marketing quotas for dairy products...
...Congress was willing enough to go along with effective controls on tobacco, rice, peanuts and cotton, and even reluctantly accepted suffer controls on wheat...
Vol. 45 • November 1962 • No. 23
