Present and Prospective Policy Problems of U.S. Agriculture: As Viewed by an Economist

Abstract

W HAT is the present state of agricultural policy? Understanding the present state of affairs always involves knowing some previous state. What policy decision makers are doing today is not only conditioned but also predetermined in a major degree by the successes and failures of time past-as well as by the changing structure of our political, economic, and social institutions. I want to look at each of these matters in turn. But first, where are we today and how did we get there? Clearly we are at another node in agricultural policy. Over the decade ending in 1963 two alternative approaches to the farm problem were attempted. Both failed for lack of political acceptance. During the Eisenhower years, Secretary Benson made a valiant attempt, as he would put it, to return the farmer to the free market. Following that, the Kennedy Administration attempted to implement a system of government-run supply managment using direct mandatory controls. Both of these approaches are now denied us. What is left? One must look at the successes of these two administrations to answer this. The Eisenhower Administration presided over the creation of PL 480, the Soil Bank, and a great enlargement of domestic supplemental and special food programs. The Soil Bank was not an unalloyed success, but it was the experiment from which we have learned much of what we know today about how to withdraw land from farm production. The Kennedy Administration passed an emergency feed grain bill in 1961 which is genuinely popular with farmers and which contains several ideas since extended to wheat and now extended to cotton in the 1965 Omnibus Farm

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