For Farmers: Flexibility

In this congressional election year, the vote-chaser's farm program would be a pleasantly flavored nostrum designed to produce a surplus of votes. This week, in the farm message he sent to Congress, President Eisenhower turned away from the politically expedient course. He faced the facts of life down on the farm.

The facts are uncomfortable. Granaries and warehouses are bulging with surplus farm crops--wheat, corn, cotton, dairy products--all paid for by the Government. Present farm laws still encourage production of surpluses. To meet 1954 commitments, the Administration had to ask for an increase from $6.7 billion to $8.5 billion in the amount it can spend on the price-support program. To meet the long-range aspects of the problem, the President and Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson proposed a basic change in the farm program.

"Insulations." Most important of the proposals: a shift, in 1955, to flexible supports for basic farm crops, e.g., wheat, corn and cotton. The basic-crop prices are now supported at 90% of parity. Under the Eisenhower program, a return to the principles of the farm bill passed by the 80th Congress, support prices would slide down to 75% of parity when a crop is in surplus, rise to 90% when it is scarce. The theory: farmers, with an eye on the support price, would base their planting on the law of supply & demand. To cushion the effects of the change to flexible supports, the Federal Government would limit the rate at which support prices could drop to 5% a year. It would also "insulate" $2.5 billion worth of Government-held surpluses, taking them out of the normal channels and diverting them to special uses, e.g., school-lunch programs and famine relief abroad.

There would be specific changes for various crops, e.g., corn-support prices would be allowed to drop faster than others because most corn, used to feed livestock, never leaves the farm on which it is grown.

Said Eisenhower, in his State of the Union message: "This farm program . . . will build markets, protect the consumer's food supply, and move food into consumption instead of into storage ... It promises our farmers a higher and steadier financial return over the years than any alternative plan."

Help Needed. Other possible ways of handling the farm-price problem:

1) Ending price supports. This is politically unthinkable.

2) Continuing the present system, in which Government supports build up bigger and bigger surpluses for the Government to buy, thus encouraging still bigger and bigger surpluses, and so on.

3) Keeping rigid supports while cutting surpluses by stricter limitations of acreage, farm by farm, thus putting every farmer under Government control.

Despite the danger of these three other courses, Ike's program faced a rough time in Congress. The 1954 elections may well turn on the farm vote. Farmers are worried, sore over falling incomes, restive. If Benson is to get his program passed, he will need all the help Ike can give him.

A subject with which Zarubin has more than the average diplomat's experience. Georgi Zarubin was the U.S.S.R.'s Ambassador to Canada when Code Clerk Igor Gouzenko fled the Russian embassy and, turning himself over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, laid bare the workings of the Soviet Union's atomic spy ring in Canada, Britain and the U.S. Soon after Gouzenko told his story, Ambassador Zarubin abruptly left the country; he never returned.

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