Toward the Fork

Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman warned last week that U.S. farm policy is heading toward a fork in its rutted road. One way, he. said, leads to "supply management"--a term for the high price supports and strict production controls that Freeman favors. The other route is that of "the free market"--and, Freeman insists, to take it would mean that "rural America would be irreparably changed, communities destroyed, institutions seriously damaged."

The very next day the U.S. Senate gave Freeman a push in the direction he wants to follow. It passed a bill giving Freeman greater powers over agriculture. Under existing laws, the national wheat land is fixed at 55 million acres. The Senate bill would remove that limitation and give Freeman the right to estimate the amount of wheat the nation will need each year and tell individual farmers how many acres they may plant.

Also in the bill was a sleeper: an amendment casually introduced by Agriculture Committee Chairman Allen Ellender. It would repeal, starting with the 1964 crops, the present requirement that feed grains be supported at a minimum 65% of parity. In other words, feed grains might not be supported at all--and neither farmers nor farm politicians are ready for that drastic a step.

Too late Republicans tried to reverse the vote on the amendment. Iowa's Bourke Hickenlooper explained that Freeman could use it as a club: by confronting Congressmen with the prospect of no feed-grain supports whatever, he might be able to beat Congressmen into accepting his whole program for "supply management." But the G.O.P. motion to reconsider the amendment failed. That left it up to conferees from the Senate and the House to undo the damage.

Other congressional actions last week:

> The Senate passed and sent to the House a bill tightening drug safety controls. Reflecting concern over the baby-deforming side effects of the drug thalidomide, the bill would require drug firms to record all side effects of their drugs, list such effects in sales literature, prove that a drug is effective as well as safe.

>The Senate also passed, for the President's signature, a $73 million appropriation to compensate the Philippines for World War II damages, thus partially atoning for an affront to the islands inflicted by a House vote to kill the bill last May. The House action had so angered the Philippines that President Diosdado Macapagal canceled his scheduled goodwill visit to the U.S. At President Kennedy's urging, the House later reversed itself. After the Senate appropriation--final installment on a total payment of $473 million--Kennedy said he hoped that the whole incident "can now be regarded as an unhappy footnote in the long history of our relations with the Philippines."

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