Self-Service Plan

In his farm message to Congress last week. President Kennedy sounded a bit like a doctor who, noting that the patient suffers from cramps and rashes after eating strawberries, advises him to eat plenty of strawberry jam.

Federal farm programs, said the President, are "drifting into a chaotic state, piling up surpluses, penalizing efficiency, rewarding inertia." Very true. But then the President went on to prescribe a big dose of the same kinds of programs: direct and indirect subsidies, plus entangling controls to cope with the surpluses that the subsidies help to create. If carried out, the Kennedy proposals would even extend subsidies and controls to farm products--most fruits, vegetables and livestock--that are now normally outside the farm policy mess.

Plowed Under. The kernel of the New Frontier proposals calls for establishment of a "national farmer advisory committee'' for each farm commodity or group of related commodities. Each committee would draw up a "supply adjustment program" for its commodity, if it took a notion to do so. The turnip committee, say. would draft a turnip plan and submit it to the turnip growers. If two-thirds of them approved it, it would automatically become law, at the expense of consumers and taxpayers, unless Congress vetoed the program within 60 days--and what Congressman would vote against turnips if his onions might be in the scales next day? In effect, the drafting of farm legislation would be lifted from Congress and given over to the particular farmers who would benefit from it--an approach not so very different from letting smugglers write the customs regulations. Texas' Democratic Congressman William Robert Poage put forward a similar plan last year, but the House plowed it under. The New Frontier version is likely to get plowed under, too.

The farm message stirred strong reactions. Holding aloft a copy, Minnesota's Democratic Senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey told a cheering convention of the National Farmers' Union, meeting in Washington, that "the President of the U.S. is on your side now. All I can say is, thank God -- and with all reverence, thank you, Mr. President, for the farm message you sent us today." Some other remarks were less ecstatic. "Nebulous and rather complicated." sniffed Louisiana's Allen Ellender, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. "A do-it-yourself kit for every farm commodity." hooted Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois: the executive branch "could completely divest itself of all responsibility." Argued Vermont's Republican Senator George Aiken: "If farm groups can write their own tickets, some will ask: Why not let labor or industrial groups do the same thing?" Moving Again. The President's farm message was of a piece with other bits of farm policy that had slipped by all but unnoticed in the crowded early days of the New Frontier. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman's first major official act was to raise cotton subsidies, a move that drew jeers from just about everybody except cotton farmers. Pointing out that hefty U.S. cotton exports had been cutting down the cotton surplus, the Farm Bureau Federation's President Charles Shuman groaned that Freeman's decision would "reverse these favorable trends" by pricing U.S. cotton out of some overseas markets. Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges, his team loyalty strained beyond the breaking point, complained that Freeman's generosity would make it all the harder for U.S. cotton-textile mills to compete against foreign imports. Undaunted, Freeman went on to raise support prices on dairy products and promise increases for feed-grain crops.

In farm policy, in short, the new Administration is getting things "moving again," but in the wrong direction, toward more rather than less Government involvement in agriculture. The record so far adds a special credibility to one sentence in the President's farm message: "We cannot expect to solve the farm problem in a day or in a year, or perhaps even in this Administration."

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