Harkin’s Plan to Aid Farms Faces Uphill Fight

Sen. Tom Harkin spelled out plans for his farm bill in no uncertain terms at a recent House hearing.

“I intend to push for a vote on the Senate floor this year,” the Iowa Democrat told a wheat, soybeans and feedgrains subcommittee.

“And if we don’t get it this year, I’ll bring it up again next year,” he added. “And if we don’t get it next year, I’ll bring it up the year after that.”

The Harkin-Gephardt farm bill is often called an idea whose time has yet to come. And no one knows when or if it ever will.

But Harkin, with an almost messianic fervor, is plugging away for his plan to raise farm prices and thus farm incomes through mandatory controls on crop production.

More Senate hearings are set for this month on the measure, which has lingered in the debate stage for the last three years of rough times on the farm.

The plan’s roots trace back at least as far as Sept. 26, 1960, when something similar was proposed on a Chicago television station by then-Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) in a presidential campaign debate with then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

Asked about farm surpluses, Kennedy said that “the only policy that will work will be for effective supply and demand to be in balance, and that can only be done through governmental action.”

Harkin proclaims the program “our best hope to stabilize and maintain our family farm system of agriculture, relieve the economic crisis facing many farmers and bring some economic sanity to our farm programs.

“Under our current program, the free market offers grain farmers only the freedom to go broke,” he says. “Government has been involved in agriculture since the first spade of soil was turned over in this country--and always will be.”

Critics retort that the measure would escalate prices, making American farm goods uncompetitive on world markets and requiring protectionism at home. At the same time, they say, U.S. consumers would pay more for food.