Agriculture Under the Trade Agreements

Report Outline
Barter Plans and Export Subsidies for Farm Products
Agricultural Exports and the Home Market
Measuring the Effect of Trade Agreements
Farmers' Opposition to Trade Agreements
Special Focus

Barter Plans and Export Subsidies for Farm Products

Two Years of bumper crops have brought back large surpluses of agricultural commodities to the United States, depressing farm prices and confronting Congress with urgent demands for additional legislation to help the farmers. Leading proposals now under consideration are an export subsidy for cotton, and the plan of Senator Byrnes (D., S. C.) to barter surplus stocks of farm commodities for tin, manganese, rubber and other strategic materials which would be stored to form a reserve for use in war.

Farm organizations are also advocating the virtual exclusion of all competing foreign farm products. But either higher tariffs or measures to dump American commodities on foreign markets would threaten the success of the administration's reciprocal trade agreement program. Administration leaders are trying to frame measures to meet the present situation which will not conflict with policies adopted earlier.

Secretary of Agriculture Wallace was quoted as telling the Senate Appropriations Committee on April 13 that “The reciprocal trade program has not brought back to the farmers of the United States more than a small portion of their lost markets for wheat, and due to world conditions cannot do so in the future.” At his press conference on April 26 Wallace said that the barter proposal should be confined to the exchange of cotton and wheat for rubber and tin, and he insisted that such a plan would not run counter to the State Department's trade agreement program. However, on April 16 the Department of Commerce had issued a release citing figures to prove that the United States had profited more by trade agreements than had Germany from “barter, clearing, compensation, or similar trade programs.”