Agriculture: Must Reading

A timely proposal to reform the costly and wasteful agricultural programs operating in North America, Western Europe and Japan has been drawn up for the Trilateral Commission. It makes must reading for government leaders.

The report is timely because it coincides with preparations for writing another General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. That agreement could, by emphasizing agriculture, facilitate reforms that would benefit both developing nations and the already-developed nations.

The report is important because there is growing consumer and government resistance to the costly farmer subsidies and income supports. That resistance in turn creates a political climate more amenable to the difficult task of reforming farm legislation. The next two or three years afford the best opportunity for reform since World War II, according to the new study.

The Trilateral Commission is a private citizen group. The membership includes many distinguished citizens of the economic summit nations. The report offers them a new opportunity to exercise their influence.

The new agriculture study is the work of D. Gale Johnson, professor of economics at the University of Chicago; Kenzo Hemmi, professor of economics at Asia University in Tokyo, and Pierre Lardinois, a former Netherlands minister of agriculture.

There were indications of the difficulty of farm reform last year when Congress and the Reagan Administration struggled to draft a five-year omnibus farm bill. The reforms, advocated by the Administration but resisted by Congress in the face of the deep farm recession, were largely ignored as the expensive remedies of the last 50 years were once again renewed.

Those writing the Trilateral report call for much the same reform that President Reagan proposed--a shift to programs that are market-oriented, creating an authentic world market competition. But the report realistically emphasizes that this can be done only slowly, on a transitional basis, over a period as long as seven years, and that it can work only if it is a joint effort of the rival producer regions. Until that can be negotiated, the report emphasizes, there should be a freeze on existing programs so that none of trade barriers now in place are broadened.

A useful starting place for implementing the report would be the economic summit next May in Tokyo. A push from those leaders would signal to world trading partners a seriousness about including agriculture in the next GATT round. It would be a particularly important issue for Reagan to raise.