Farming: The last welfare culture.(Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service)

The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Friday, 9-28:

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House Republicans must have cotton in their ears if they can't hear the growing roar coming over U.S. farm policy.

They are proceeding as if it is business as usual, hoping to vote as early as next week on a $170 billion farm bill that would keep agricultural subsidies at or above current levels for the next decade. As sure as there is corn in Kansas and a fall harvest coming, this approach is doomed.

The bill is to govern farm policy beginning next year, when the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act expires. Nearly $74 billion of the total was to come from anticipated budget surpluses, money that now is likely to be spent on defense _ if the slowing economy doesn't make it vanish.

Agricultural policy, in which the government favors some crops over others and rewards rich and poor landowners alike more than working farmers, drastically needs an overhaul. The 1996 act was intended to begin structurally changing a farm support system that dated from the Great Depression, but it has failed miserably to ease dependence on subsidies.

In fact, the act has exacerbated the problem. Direct payments to growers of certain crops over the last four years have totaled $28 billion more than was anticipated by the 1996 law.