THE SEARCH FOR PARITY:

Abstract

sSince World War 1, the planning environment of farming in the United States has changed beyond recognition, as new laws set up agencies and programs designed to improve the farmers' lot and develop a sound agricultural industry. If we are serious about improving private incentives to forestry, J2•rm experience suggests that we shouM try to correct imperJbctions in such basic' institutions as markets, ownership, credit and inJbrmation. Neither President Harding nor the lder Wallace foresaw when they opened the National Agricultural Conference in January 1922 that farmers would stay in bad shape until they were bailed out by World War II demand. In fact. the trouble started shortly after World War I, when the nations that American farmers had been feeding got organized to look after themselves more quickly than anyone expected. The sudden drop in American exports flooded our domestic markets, and the bottom fell out of farm prices. Farmers' losses led them to try and catch up by planting and selling even more the next year. This, of course, produced a continuing glut and threw the market system into a vicious tailspin that for decades defied the corrective efforts of any single farmer acting on his own. Gradually it became clear that some kind of collective action was needed to modify the workings of the free market system before it destroyed so many farmers that a violent swing toward scarcity and sky-high prices would be needed to produce the food city peo-