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Show 'Revised' Farm Program Begins to Take Shape Greater Curtailment of Surplus Crops Seen; Administration's Stand Against Con- 1 voys Has Significant Angle. By BAUKHAGE 1, National F arm and Home Hour Commentator. WNTJ Service, 1395 National Press Bldg., Washington, D. C. WASHINGTON. A new and revolutionary revo-lutionary farm program for America Amer-ica is in the works. If it is carried out according to the wishes of the administration, it will mean the first step in an effort to change the whole pattern of farming in this country as we have accepted it for the last century. When this column is in print the new bill may be made public. At this writing even its outline has not been announced. But a careful review re-view sf discussions in highly influential influ-ential government circles justifies three predictions: (1) That the new bill will revolutionize revolu-tionize New Deal farm policy and will have for its goal a (2) Vastly greater curtailment of production of surplus products, and (3) Complete change in type of some of the crops now raised by farmers. What is behind the change in policy pol-icy is this: the last die-hards who believed that any American farm program should take for granted a return to "normal" world trade, have thrown up the sponge. There is at long last a majority agreement agree-ment in the department of agriculture agricul-ture that American farming must follow a new pattern one that calls for no subsidy for lost export markets mar-kets of the past, no attempt to nurse along surpluses on the assumption that the same foreign markets on which we once counted would be again available. Original Purpose. Roughly, the original purpose of the agricultural adjustment legislation legisla-tion was to secure reduction of certain cer-tain crops and with the payments provide a livelihood for thousands of farmers who had lost their markets. Later conservation was emphasized; but the theory behind the subsidies was also to permit" the farmer who formerly depended on the foreign market to keep his plant going, to keep him "tooled" to keep, for example, ex-ample, a wheat farmer a wheat farmer against the day when the foreign market was restored. By 1933 when the Triple A was started foreign markets had pretty well melted but the pattern of American Amer-ican farming itself was the same, generally speaking, as it had been for a hundred years. The Triple A policy was planned to preserve that pattern and fill the empty corners in the mould by artificial means. When I say the pattern was preserved, I mean that all the Triple A wanted to do was to cut down production to the point where demand and supply approximately balanced. "The policy pol-icy of the congress as stated in the Agricultural Adjustment act was to restore to American farm products, as rapidly as practicable, the same purchasing power in terms of things farmers buy that those products had in the five-year period (1909-1914) immediately preceding the World war." So if you were told to plow under your cotton this year, this did not mean go out of the business of raising rais-ing cotton for good. You were supposed sup-posed to get payments so you could stay alive until it paid to raise more cotton again. Now a New Pattern. But now a new pattern has been drawn. It is based on the belief that the major foreign markets are gone for good or at least for so long that they cannot be reckoned on any longer. Some farmers will just have to face the fact that they must make permanent shifts in their crops. Here is the key phrase of the new policy in a sentence taken from the annual report of the department of agriculture recently published: "Growing unneeded crops is sheer waste of labor, of capital, of soil, even if temporarily the products can go into storage under government loans." This change in agricultural adjustment ad-justment policy was not heralded in advance. But little by little hints have been dropped as to what is coming. Secretary Wickard sounded a muted warning that the definite trend in foreign trade was downward down-ward in his recent speech at Purdue Pur-due university. His Supplementary Cotton plan followed as a step in the direction of reducing the cotton surpluses, shifting acreage to food crops. In the annual report of the department of agriculture are further fur-ther hints, as to the "adjustments" which are to be faced by the producers pro-ducers of foodstuffs, tobacco and the other things which formerly made up our farm export trade. Still a Possibility. Of course, the administration does not say, "there will never again be any foreign market whatever for farm products." But the new policy refuses to take for granted that such outlets will ever return to what we have always insisted on calling "normal." This viewpoint represents a struggle strug-gle between those who fought to the end with hope as their chief support. sup-port. The last light went out when the Hull reciprocal trade program collapsed in the face of war. Now agreement has been reached that the old plan must be scrapped and that America must build a new market mar-ket for the farmer based on the theory that in war or peace the trend is strongly away from a possible pos-sible profitable export trade. It might be said here, however, that the producers of meats and fruits and vegetables are going to benefit by the immediate situation at least temporarily when the contents con-tents of the newly filled pay envelopes enve-lopes of the defense industries will be exchanged for these products in home consumption. But a wide disparity of prices is due between these products and cotton, cot-ton, wheat, corn and tobacco. The latter staples are among those which the administration believes must be curtailed under the nev plan. Are We 'In' or 'Ouf Of the Current War? There is a popular response around Washington which you frequently fre-quently hear in answer to the question, ques-tion, "do you think we'll get into the war?" It is another question: "Aren't we already in?" That remark was started somewhat some-what facetiously but now you will hear it stated seriously, if unofficially, unoffi-cially, in the affirmative by some officials. of-ficials. And if you judge by the old standards when a country was either a belligerent or a neutral we are "in." Because we are not neutral neu-tral and Secretary Hull himself has said so he said that the law of self-preservation self-preservation and not neutrality now governs the nation. We have taken many steps which could be offered to prove that Mr. Hull is legally correct. But all the old rules are off. Undeclared war is the popular stunt these days. It is the way the totalitarians do it and we are being forced to take over a lot of these measures in order or-der to fight fire with fire. The job will be to scrap them all when the trouble is over. But in the real sense we are not a war. No Americans under the American flag are shooting anybody under any other flag. And that is something. And a high official of the United States government has made it clear that that was what the President had in mind when he said that he had never considered using American warships to convoy supplies through the war zone to Great Britain. It has been predicted pre-dicted frequently that convoys would be our next step. Well, this official explained that the reason the administration ad-ministration was against the use of convoys was because "when a convoy con-voy gets into the war zone there is likely to be shooting and shooting comes awfully close to war." Statement's tftgnificance. It seemed to me significant that this statement was made on the same day that former Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, testifying before the foreign affairs committee on the lease-lend bill, said almost the same thing in other words. It almost looked as if the two spokesmen. had gotten together beforehand. That was the same day, as some of you may remember, that I had said earlier on the Farm and Home hour that I could find no indication in Washington that any steps were being taken to get us into the war. My observation was a coincidence. Perhaps the conjunction of the other oth-er remarks was, too. To the men who were in France in the last war, we will still be at peace as long as we are not shooting shoot-ing anybody. |