Blinding glimpses of the obvious

Alan Guebert is an Illinois farm journalist.

Monday, Feb. 22, 1999, was a record day for BGOs.

Never heard of a BGO? It’s reporter shorthand for “blinding glimpse of the obvious.” Every time you turned around Feb. 22 you were smacked by a set of searing BGOs.

The raucous day began with 30,000 European farmers violently protesting a European Union ag ministers’ meeting in Brussels. The farmers, who police bombed with water cannons and tear gas, were angry with the EU’s proposed Freedom to Farm-like ag policy, Agenda 2000, and its forecasted 30 percent cut in farm support prices.

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The ministers were surprised by the farmer fury. They blindly hoped farmers from Rome to Rotterdam would meekly accept a 30 percent hit in income. Au contraire, mon ami.

Later that day in Washington, D.C., the stark results of America’s Freedom to Farm experiment were made painfully plain in one gloom-filled presentation after another at USDA’s 75th annual Ag Outlook Forum. According to USDA speakers, the 1999-2000 crop year will bring U.S. farmers:

The third consecutive record-breaking soybean crop, complete with record plantings, a record harvest, a record carryover; and $4 harvest prices this fall. Soybean futures in Chicago dropped to a 23-year low on the bleak news.
Despite the lowest winter wheat plantings since 1972 and total U.S. wheat seedings down a stunning eight million acres in just two years, the season average wheat price was forecast to be just 25 cents more than 1998’s sickly $2.70 per bushel, the lowest seasonal price in eight years.
At 78.5 million acres, farmers will plant the least amount of corn since 1995, but carryover will remain a fat 1.78 billion bu., and the season average price will equal 1998’s puny $1.95 per bu. price.
1999 ag exports were cut again; the new total is forecast at $49 billion, $4.6 billion under 1998’s drooping sales.
And, according to USDA chief economist Keith Collins, farm income will fall another $3 to $4 billion in 1999.

One more calamitous fact: The government will spend an estimated $18 billion in farmer assistance in fiscal year 1999, the highest farm program cost since 1987.

A simple glimpse of these facts – three years of falling income, falling prices, falling exports, growing stocks and a government cost over 200 percent greater than forecast – shows what should be blindingly obvious to all: Freedom to Farm has been a dismal, costly disaster.

U.S. secretary of agriculture Dan Glickman acknowledged this BGO during opening remarks to kick off the Feb. 22 conference.

If the ag economy doesn’t turn soon, Glickman predicted, “We are going to have a social catastrophe in some parts of rural America.”

When speaking to reporters after a speech to the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture later that day, Glickman suggested another BGO: the secretary of agriculture needs authority to impose crop set-asides in times of low prices and overproduction, a one-time power now expressly outlawed by freedom to farm.

But he then backed off the idea noting, “We are not making any formal legislative suggestions (for it).”

Instead, both Glickman and House ag committee chair Larry Combest told the state ag folks that crop insurance “and other safety nets for farmers” should be strengthened.

Most farmers aren’t buying this foolishness anymore. Many, some grudgingly, say set-asides are inevitable despite all the splendid theory behind freedom to farm. Their reasoning is simple: Why produce it if it can’t be sold?

That, too, is a blinding glimpse of the obvious.