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Show The Farm Act Driving through the Corn Belt, you can see great piles of corn rotting rot-ting in the mud. Then driving less than a hundred miles you can see discouraged men and women shuffling shuff-ling in breadlines. A great dairy farm not more than sixty miles from New York is pouring pour-ing skim milk down its sewers, while in New York City school children faint from hunger at their desks. Not only last year, but for many years past, part of the nation's apple ap-ple crop went back to earth unhar-vested. unhar-vested. Yet thousands of persons who wanted those apples couldn't get them. Is there, then such a thing as a surplus sur-plus of farm products when people are going hungry in town? This is a hard question. It cannot be answered in theory. The fact is that surpluses do exist; ex-ist; they exist side by side with breadlines; they add to these breadlines. bread-lines. They turn the results of human hu-man effort into economic waste. The fact is that the domestic consumption con-sumption of food has not declined very much. In one way or another our people are being fed. The fact is that if beginning today you could restore completely the usual domestic consumption of food products, there would still be an unsalable un-salable surplus of certain basic commodities. com-modities. The fact -is that these surpluses have been in the making for more 'than a decade. Part of the surplus you can see. You can see that pile of corn in the field, wasting. You can see those apples rotting on the ground. Most surpluses you cannot see so easily. They move in the channels of trade. But you, if you are a farmer, can feel them; you are feeling feel-ing them, right now. Some of the surpluses in trade channels you may find in warehouses or storage bins. Others are forced on to consumers who will take them only at tragically low prices. I The apples you see rotting on the 'ground do not depress prices. But jthe surpluses in trade channels, i which you do not see, harm the entire en-tire nation. They pound down prices, slash the farmers' buying power, cause farmers to buy less from cities, and in the end. add to city unemployment. unem-ployment. Crop surpluses have had as disastrous dis-astrous an effect upon national well-being well-being as crop shortages used to have on the isolated communities of a simpler age. The new Farm Act does not condemn con-demn this fact. It seeks to help farmers correct it. Perhaps the ideal solution would be to bring about by some miraculous miracul-ous means, as yet unsuggested, an immediate distribution of these burdensome bur-densome surpluses to deficit countries coun-tries and compensate American farmers fairly for the shipment. The new farm act is not an idealistic ideal-istic solution. It does not attempt the impossible. It tackles the reality exactly as it exists in our complex social and economic structure. That reality bears repetition surpluses do crush the buying power of 44 per cent of our population. Farmers, compelled to take any price the market would pay, have been the shock absorber, the stabilizer stabiliz-er of hard times. But farmers have carried on this kind of national philanthropy for 12 hard years. Now agriculture is bankrupt. Hundreds of thousands of farmers are losing their homes. No nation on earth can ruin its most basic industry and hope to survive. There is not a man or woman in a city in the United States who doesn't want the farmer farm-er to get a decent price, or a falr exchange of goods he needs, for his labors. The Act recognizes that farmers cannot buy from industry until prices of farm commodities go up. It recognizes frankly that prices cannot go up in the face of unsalable surpluses. That is why the Farm Act provides pro-vides machinery to attack the surplus. sur-plus. This surplus problem is not new. It is the result of forces bigger big-ger even than the shadow of unemployment. unem-ployment. Like so many of our current cur-rent difficulties, it is in part, an aftermath of the World War. The war called into production millions of new acres acres that kept on producing long after the war -need had gone. The nation then created a ficiti-ous ficiti-ous need for a large share of these I acres by lending money abroad to make it possible for Europe to buy I our exports. But in the meantime, Europe was bringing her own land back into cultivation. South Ameri-'ca Ameri-'ca and Australia were expanding their production. And so was Canada. Cana-da. When American loans to European 'nations ceased as they had to some-itime some-itime everything changed. In the source of the subsequent depression, Europe threw up new tariffs, milling restrictions, and quotas of one kind or another. Our I export commodities could not mount them. And so these products backed back-ed up into the home market to de- press prices still further, prices that I had been unsatisfactory for nearly ! 12 years. ' Here are some of the surpluses the farmer feels In his pocketbook: At the beginning of the present crop year we had on hand a wheat carryover 250,000,000 bushels in ex-'cess ex-'cess of normal; of flue-cured tobac-Ico, tobac-Ico, 150,000,000 pounds in excess of normal; cotton, 7,000,000 bales in excess1 of normal. The cotton surplus sur-plus is due partly to decreased exports, ex-ports, and largely to decreased tak-'ing tak-'ing by American industries, such as the tire industry. To Ignore these surpluses, would mean that the farmers would go on producing for a market that doesn't exist. There is no profit in that. It would only perpetuate the present condition in which the farmer finds that it takes twice as much of his produce to buy a given quantity of industrial goods as it did in that fairexchange period. 1909-1914. Not an idealistic solution, but a practicable one, the new farm act presents an opportunity to break the present vicious circle that leads from surpluses to breadlines. It gives the nation the machinery to use In ; bringing some measure of order to production, leading to improved farm prices, farmers buying more ' from cities, and men going back to work in industrial plants. |