A Blow at Parity

"The spirit of Ezra Benson is certainly in this chamber tonight," gloomed Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey one night last week, as the Senate steamed through its third day of debate on the Administration's 1958 farm bill. Humphrey, longtime big farm-subsidy spender, was dead right. Benson's aides were hard at work outside the chamber feeding statistics and arguments to their rapidly growing body of supporters. Later the same night the Benson-backed bill, a promising step toward whittling down surplus-producing farm price supports, passed the Senate by a towering majority --62 for, Humphrey and ten other Democrats against--and went to the House for near-certain approval this week.

The Benson bill, strongly favored by the American Farm Bureau Federation, had in fact sneaked up on Congress in the wake of the President's veto of the no-good price-freeze farm bill last March. Its principal achievement was that it was a considerable victory over Benson's old enemy--parity. This price-propping concept, which has been built into farm legislation since 1933, is a formularized measure of the relationship between the prices of farm products and other goods. The Benson-backed alternative: a price support based on 90% of the average market price over the previous three years before the crop is raised and sold. Beginning with parity-inflated market prices, the new formula would let prices slip by easy stages until, says Benson, the law of supply and demand begins to take over and surpluses begin to sell. Props are to move toward market levels for corn, cotton, rice and feed grains (oats, rye, barley and grain sorghums). Wheat, tobacco and peanuts, as well as milk, still have separate programs, a more-or-less deliberate tactic that helps Benson keep the once powerful farm bloc divided.

Main difficulty is that the new bill also relaxes or abolishes acreage controls, raises the prospect that farmers across the country could suddenly decide to put every available acre in, say, corn and sell to the Government at the announced price ($1.10 per bu. minimum). This danger is increased by the termination this year of the Soil Bank's expensive "acreage reserve" section, under which farmers were paid for keeping acres out of corn and other cash crops. Benson himself knows that the $6 billion annual cost of the farm program, big enough to bother Hubert Humphrey, is not likely to come down very fast. But he is heartened by the fact that the new bill at least starts the program in the right direction.

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