Farm Reform?

With a tone that rarely creeps into Eisenhower messages to Congress, the President last week attacked that costly, archaic contraption, the federal farm-price-support program. Said Ike in his farm message to Congress: P: It "has not worked." Most of the money goes to larger producers who need no help. "It does little to help the farmers in greatest difficulty." P: It breeds ever bigger surpluses, because high support prices attract capital to supported crops, and soaring farm technology keeps defeating crop-control measures. P: It is "excessively expensive." Farm-stabilization costs are running to $5.4 billion this year, and surpluses have piled up so high that the cost of storing the stuff will soon run to $1 billion a year.

But after his lionlike complaints, the President offered lamblike recommendations. He urged Congress to abandon the parity formula--based on farm prices and farm costs in 1910-14, good years for U.S. farmers--and let Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson set price supports between 75% and 90% of the average market price in the preceding three years. As an alternative, if Congress could not bring itself to discard the parity idea, Ike suggested that Benson get authority to set support prices as low as 60% of parity.

In addition the President said he is "setting steps in motion to explore" ways of disposing of U.S. farm surpluses overseas so as to foster peace. "Food," he said, "can be a powerful instrument for all the free world in building a durable peace." He would call conferences to work out the details.

Mild as the President's recommendations were, farm-state members of Congress found them too hard. "Antifarmer," cried North Carolina's Harold D. Cooley, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. Barked Louisiana's Allen J. Ellender, Cooley's opposite number in the Senate: the request for lower price supports "doesn't stand a ghost of a chance." Nor does the U.S., if Cooley and Ellender have their way, stand a ghost of a chance of coping with the farm scandal.

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