MISSOURI WATCH: NEW FARM LAW COULD BE CROPPER

Q: When is nothing better than something?

A: When Washington writes a revised farm law.

No one seems to know what propelled President Bill Clinton to sign the misnamed Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act, which provides the nation with yet another new acronym: FAIR. In typical Clinton fashion, the White House used such phrases as "better than nothing" and "an improvement over the original House bill." Neither provides a rational excuse for a presidential surrender to a measure that originally started with the name Freedom to Farm.

The problem with the new Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act is that it is not FAIR at all, despite all the political rhetoric that has accompanied it, and the word can only be used to replace good or excellent. But U.S. agriculture needs something better than fair when it comes to legislation that is designed to last into the next century. Those interested in agriculture had hoped that real progress could be made in bolstering not only the well-being of the family farm but the role of American exports in an increasingly competitive world marketplace.

To put it bluntly, the new farm law is inexcusably bad. Billions of dollars will be paid out at a time of strong markets, in blatant contradiction of the fiscal rectitude that both political parties have been promising. Moreover, in a great many cases, the U.S. Treasury checks will be issued without requiring anything of the recipient, not even the planting of a crop. Even as huge sums will be handed out when not needed, effective income support will be denied at a future time when it may be badly needed. As another negative, the new law weakens the crop-reserve feature of past farm programs, reserves that have been stabilizing not only to farmers' income but to export trade as well.

Some of the sweeteners that were added to FAIR are defensible. That can be said for the several food programs. Financing a Fund for Rural America is probably worthwhile. It's splendid that Conservation Compliance has been retained, although enforcement in a new "decoupled" setting will likely be difficult and could be horrendous, raising new negative images for American agriculture. Retaining the full 36,000,000 acres of the Conservation Reserve Program is an overreach; the CRP should have been made meaner and leaner.

How could such a law reach enactment? Prior to the time Agriculture chairman Jim Roberts jumped on the Freedom to Farm pedestal, nothing like it was in sight. To be sure, planting flexibility was already a "given" for a new law. But each previous step toward flexibility lowered the payments to farmers and cost to government. In FAIR we are getting the opposite---total flex and payments, at least for the next year or two, much larger than the 1990 law would have called for.

The farm experts contacted for this piece suggest two possible interpretations of the 1996 lawmaking process. Both are Machiavelian. Neither is highly convincing, yet not wholly incredible.

The first such idea is that the new law was crafted to be as openly, visibly objectionable as possible so as to insure that it does indeed bring all farm programs to an end in 2002. The National Farmers Union calls the new law a "public relations nightmare." It is indeed. It lends itself to derision and will get lots of it. Some expect it will be derided into oblivion.

The second explanation advanced embodies even more long range scheming. Transitional payments were provided, ostensibly to make it easier for farmers to adjust to a future cold, hard, no-program world. If instead of FAIR the 1990 farm law had been extended a year or two, deficiency payments this year would have shrunk to near zero. A couple of years of little or no cost would have made it difficult in a future year of surpluses to restore anything close to 1990-law levels of price and income aid.

Maybe the pitch of permanently ending acreage controls and price supports was indeed a ruse. Congressman Roberts hinted as much in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, saying FAIR makes it possible for Congress to say yes to a bailout in trying times. It will certainly be easier to say yes if a budget item of a few billion dollars has been preserved.

Everyone has to wonder why taxpayers should now pay a high price for maintaining the right to pay more when more is badly needed.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.