AGRICULTURE: Plan for Abundance

While President Truman was trying to cope with the food shortage at hand (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), the Department of Agriculture planted the seed of a program to handle the abundance to come. Before a joint meeting of the House and Senate agricultural committees last week, Secretary of Agriculture Clinton P. Anderson presented the department’s program to support farm prices after the wartime agricultural price-support law expires at the end of next year.

As such, the presentation of a new parity program now was obvious politicking; no one thought there would be sizable surpluses for years. On the other hand, few thought that the current program would not be continued in some form, no matter how much critics cried out against Government buying of potatoes, eggs, etc. to keep prices high. So the best critics could hope for was an improvement on the current program. Anderson thought his new one was an improvement.

Biggest proposed change was in the method of computing parity* and in the level at which the Government must support parity crops.

The parity index would be changed to include the cost of hired farm labor and reflect the increased mechanization of farms. The new parity index, said Secretary Anderson, would discourage grain growing, encourage meat raising. Thus, Secretary Anderson hopes to cut down the vast commodity surpluses that have swamped the U.S.

Clint Anderson also wants to change things so that the Government will not have to buy up parity crops until prices have fallen to between 60% and 75% of parity (the present law requires purchase at 90%). To handle such crop surpluses he suggested reviving such New Deal measures as the food-stamp plan and the free school lunches, which had worked well. In short, Secretary Anderson, while making sure the farmers know they have a friend in the White House, is also trying to get around some of the pitfalls of the present program.

But critics of the support program thought Anderson had not gone far enough; farm groups thought that he had gone too far. Edward O’Neal, president of the potent American Farm Bureau Federation, objected to the lowering of the support level as well as the food-stamp plan. Ed O’Neal, who would rather keep prices up by planned scarcity, said that the federation is “profoundly opposed to feeding surplus food to low-income groups” except as a “desperate measure.” It looked as if Clint Anderson’s program would get some strong hoeing in Congress before it grows into anything worthwhile.

* Parity is a theoretical price level for farm products which is intended to give farmers the same amount of purchasing power they had in some past favorable period, usually 1909-14.