Why we need the tobacco program.

In the midst of the Depression of the 1930s, tobacco farmers, who had experienced a long history of exploitation by the tobacco companies and who were in want as a result, asked their government for help. The government responded by establishing the tobacco program. This exemplary program--run at little public cost from the beginning, and now run on the principle of "no net cost"--has kept a lot of small farmers in business for a long time. By combining price support with production control, it enacted a kind of economic justice' It helped the farmers to survive, not by "subsidizing" them, but by assuring them in return for their cooperation a fair and reasonably predictable price for their product.

Virtually from the beginning, the tobacco program has been under attack from proponents of the so-called free market. In recent years, tobacco itself has come under attack because of its effects on the health of smokers and others. And so we have come to the moral dilemma of a good program that protects the producers of an unhealthy product. We have come, at the same time, to the need to make a political distinction between the program and the product, and this is difficult.

We are not arguing in defense of tobacco. The issue of tobacco and health is substantive and serious, we know. But in Kentucky and other tobacco-producing states, we are dealing with a related issue that is equally pressing: the survival of our rural economy, which, though dependent on tobacco, has been historically and is yet a food-producing economy as well.

What we do argue is that these are separate issues, and that it would be a grave mistake to permit the free-market politicians to use the political antipathy to tobacco, however justified, to destroy the tobacco program.

Here in Kentucky, we have some 60,000 families dependent upon the crop and therefore upon the program--and we have an uncounted number of rural businesses dependent upon the trade of those 60,000 families. To allow the rural economy of this and other tobacco-producing states simply to crash--with effects upon our land and people that the politicians have so far made no attempt to foresee or protect against--will not eliminate smoking and is not a sane way to end our farmers' dependence on tobacco. On the contrary, it will do great harm in order to do no good whatsoever.

The most prominent enemy of the tobacco farmers at present is Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, who proposes to terminate the program, while paying farmers $8.00 a pound for their soon-to-be-worthless allotments. This would, ironically, be the first outright subsidy ever paid to tobacco farmers. The "buy-out" would be paid in three annual installments. The average total payment to individual growers would be $80,000.

The political philosophy underlying this proposal does not concern itself with the question of what is right, but merely subordinates all issues to the crudest sort of economic determination. Lugar made his case extremely plain: The tobacco program is not defensible, he said, because, "In many markets, U.S. tobacco is not competitive on price." In other words, if farmers in the United States cannot undersell farmers working at slave wages in the Third World, then they deserve to fail. This is a different kind of economic justice. Asking the farmer (like the industrial worker) to produce more for less has always been the objective of free-market politicians.

It is hard to imagine how a farm family's prospects might be significantly improved by $80,000 paid to them over three years for the loss of a staple crop that, with the program, would have been worth far more. To pay them at that rate without having in place some viable alternative to tobacco would be the same as paying them to quit farming--with what consequences to them and to the country nobody knows.

Lugar's buy-out would not stop a single soul from smoking, for tobacco would continue to be produced. And it would not help the smaller farmers or the rural economy to survive. What it would do is enable the tobacco companies to buy their tobacco at a much lower price. Thus the culprits in the tobacco controversy would emerge as the beneficiaries of Lugar's free-market bias, and the cost would be shifted neatly onto the farmers.

What is the alternative? The only one in view is to keep the program in place, with the understanding that it was started with the aim of protecting the livelihoods of farmers and country communities.

That is the working principle, for example, of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association, which represents Burley tobacco producers in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and West Virginia. Six years ago, this organization began an effort to reduce our region's dependence on tobacco, working with farmers and urban consumers both to diversify farm production and to cultivate local demand for locally grown foods and other products. Though this effort is still in its infancy, it has won many friends, and it has gone a considerable way toward demonstrating the possibility of the change it hopes to make.

A lot of people believe in and hope for this change, but nobody believes it can be made quickly. To develop new crops and other sources of agricultural income, to cultivate the necessary new skills, to establish markets, to solve the problems of production, transportation, storage, and processing will require at least fifteen years. Lugar's buy-out would leave our people scattered and demoralized, far short of the needed solutions.

The farmers of this country just now are beginning to understand the purpose and to feel the consequences of the "free market" and "freedom to farm." They are being driven off the land at the the most alarming rate in our history. They are experiencing the same economic devastation that brought about such measures as the tobacco program in the first place.

Having become thoughtlessly dependent on food imports and on unsustainable farm practices, we are destroying our ability to feed ourselves. Our politicians and many of our citizens barely notice.

But the tobacco program, unlike the "free market," was called into being by a human need. It has served that need faithfully and well for two generations, at little cost to anybody and to the great benefit of many. It is an example of the kind of farm policy that would serve us well and that would be adopted if there were sufficient public knowledge of the real circumstances of our farmland and our farming people.

Instead of destroying the tobacco program, the Congress should be studying it to learn how it has worked and is working.

At present, it alone stands between our people and great loss. Like the kind of political thought it represents, and like the possibility of the survival of farming, it needs friends. We are appealing unabashedly to the nation at large for that friendship.

John M. Berry Jr. and Wendell Berry live in Henry County, Kentucky. John is a lawyer, farmer, former state senator, and former president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association. Wendell is a farmer and writer. Their father, John M. Berry Sr., also was president of the Burley Cooperative.