Wrong Medicine on the Farm

Bumper crops of soybeans, sorghum, wheat and cotton and an all-time record corn harvest are expected to increase pressure on members of Congress to provide short-term protection for farmers rather than the kind of farm bill that would face up to the long-term problems of American agriculture. That is to be regretted.

The Reagan Administration is finding fierce resistance to its program to trim government programs that inflate prices and make American farm products less competitive in world markets. There remains, fortunately, a slim chance of enactment for some of the proposals to encourage so-called market-clearing prices--those at which food and fiber will get sold, not stockpiled.

Congress and the Department of Agriculture are besieged by so many special interests that there is a risk that they will neglect the priorities:

--Help should be narrowly targeted to assist only full-time commercial farmers--not the part-time farmers, not the tax shelters; it should facilitate, not frustrate, the inevitable changes in agriculture that are under way around the world.

--Special-interest programs--including the dairy, sugar, honey, tobacco and peanut programs--should be dropped once and for all from the books, for they force a ridiculous burden on consumers, providing fat subsidies to relatively small groups of producers when the public interest would be far better served by a free-market approach.

There is nothing that Congress can or should do to prevent the shake-out in agriculture that is under way in virtually every farm area, California included. The decline in the number of farms started in 1935, and will continue for years to come. The principal role of government in that circumstance is to see that marginal lands, where farming creates topsoil erosion, are the first to be left unplowed. And there are things that Congress can do to soften the transition now under way.

One other obligation falls to government: National security and global responsibility require a minimum grain-reserve program in recognition that the bumper crops at home and the global surplus of this year can, by weather changes, be converted quickly to desperate shortages and supply dislocations.

A paradox of farm politics is that the farmers themselves are asking for the wrong medicine. Bigger and quicker subsidies only postpone the cure. The subsidies that they are asking, estimated at more than $10 billion a year, would only worsen the federal budget deficit that is a critical factor in the high value of the dollar. The overvalued dollar is a major obstacle to increasing exports.