DANGER SIGNALS ON THE FARM FRONT
Mabry, Paul
wheat and cotton have been drafted and probably soon .will be in effect. Some persons feel that the threat of dumping will lead to a series of international agreements. These could be maintained,...
...The parity yardstick should be reexamined and changed...
...A commodity agreement which provided a place for surpluses by giving them away to the world's needy might function...
...It is likely, however, to be on too small a scale and, in any case, unless it is accompanied by other measures, it simply will be a palliative...
...The country probably would support a nation-wide soil conservation program that would cost a good deal of money, and almost certainly in view of our experience in the 1930s, a greatly expanded food stamp plan...
...A good many things could be done which might avert another farm crisis, or at least enable it to be dealt with without too much suffering for agriculture or cost to the country...
...But this is no reason not to draft a sensible overall farm program...
...It is true that industry is the dog that wags the agricultural tail...
...But in certain cases, for example cotton, the support may need to be changed from a high loan program to a more moderate loan accompanied by payments similar to those employed in the past...
...This stands in the way of the kind of planning that becomes more and.more necessary with each passing day...
...The guarantees to producers for the two-year period after the war also need reexamination...
...But few of those things are being done now...
...In still others the guarantees need to be reexamined in the light of a new yardstick for the measurement of farm prices and income, and of our postwar food needs...
...There's no mystery about the foundation for such a program...
...Many people, fearing inflation, have bought farm land during this war...
...Farmers need supports to prevent catastrophic price declines such as those which followed the last war...
...There is little actual contact between the economists in the BAE who talk about what would happen if we had an economy of abundance, and the administrators in WFA who run the day-to-day action programs...
...There is every likelihood that they will be taught the bitter lesson of the folks who bought high priced farm lands during World War I. The farm problem is moving back to Washington and like a good many other problems, it already has a long term lease on bigger and better quarters after the war...
...There are great possibilities in the use of surpluses such as wheat to raise the world standard of living...
...For many commodities it has become meaningless and out-of-date...
...These could be maintained, however, only so long as the United States holds the subsidy club plainly in sight...
...For agriculture to insist on clinging to parity unmodified will be as meaningless and injurious in the economic sense as some savage tabus and fetishes in the religious sense...
...This would be true even with a 150 billion dollar annual income...
...Undoubtedly, a stamp plan program will be drafted when the going in agriculture, gets hard...
...In actual practice, other nations might develop effective subsidy programs of their own, and the history of international commodity agreements is almost as dismal as that of production control in agriculture...
...Beyond the export subsidy proposal, no other ways out have been suggested and no serious work is being done on postwar programs...
...Most international agreements thus far have been scarcity agreements and have broken down as the restrictions began to pinch...
...The Bureau of Agricultural Economics estimates that crops from 8,000,000 acres could be absorbed by aid to the lower income groups through a stamp plan...
...If another industrial depression comes along, there'll be serious trouble on the farm no matter what kind of a program is in operation...
Vol. 8 • November 1944 • No. 47
