Tobacco Technique

When AAA went by the board last January, President Roosevelt whipped through a befuddled Congress a stopgap measure called the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act (TIME, March 9). The prime purpose of that law was to restore the flow of cash benefits from Washington to the nation's farmers which the Supreme Court decision had rudely interrupted. Yet the Soil Conservation Act compelled no farmer to do anything about limiting his production. If he shifted cash crop acreage to grass, the Government would pay him something. If he did not, the Government was powerless to deal with him. The cotton farmer who tried to defy the old AAA's crop restrictions was always trapped by the old Bankhead Act which stopped him at the gin with a penalty tax on his nonquota cotton. The Soil Conservation Act lacked a Bankhead Law to enforce obedience. Therefore it was definitely news last week when the Senate Agricultural Committee took steps to get immediate consideration of a supplementary farm bill nearly identical with one already passed by the House, a new scheme which may well become the prototype for ironclad laws for compulsory crop restriction.

Tobacco was picked for this first experiment largely because it is not a major U. S. crop and most of it is grown on solid Democratic soil. Then, too, though there are about ten important tobacco States, not more than four control any one of the various distinct types of this crop.

The new tobacco bills accept the Supreme Court's dictum that crop control, if any, is a function for the states rather than for the Federal Government. The essence of the new scheme is that individual states operating by mutual arrangement under identical state laws shall impose penalties on farmers who grow more than their quotas. Such state control, however, does not eliminate the Federal Government from the picture. Says the Constitution: "No State shall, without the consent of Congress . . . enter into agreement or compact with another State." Last week's law was drafted to give the necessary Congressional consent. Likewise it called for the imposition by the Federal

Government of restrictions on tobacco production in Puerto Rico to match those being imposed by the states.

The heart of the new restriction scheme is in the state law to which the Federal Government gives its legislative blessing. Although Congress has nothing to say about this, the New Deal has. As Republican Congressmen pointed out, the same gentlemen in the Department of Agriculture who wrote the AAAct helped write the new State law. Chief provisions of this State law are:

P: Tobacco commissions from each state party to the compact shall sit together, estimate consumption for the type of tobacco in question, go home and allot quotas to each tobacco farm in each state, based on the quota system of AAA.

P: Any farmer growing more than his quota would have to pay a penalty of 25% to 50% of gross value to get a state marketing certificate to make its sale legal. Either buying or selling tobacco contrary to the state law would be a misdemeanor and would subject the violator to civil penalties equal to three times the value of the tobacco.

P: If any state voluntarily drops out or is prevented by injunction from fulfilling its part of the compact, the laws of the other states in that compact would be suspended.

P: Any October, 10% of a state's tobacco producers can petition for a referendum. If one-third or more of the state's producers disapprove continuance, the restriction program for the next year would be dropped.

Month ago the Virginia General Assembly passed this law. The South Carolina Legislature has it under consideration. North Carolina may possibly have a special session to act on it. Arch-enemy of the Roosevelt Administration that he is, Governor Talmadge of Georgia, the fourth state which produces flue-cured tobacco (used in cigarets), will call no special session of his legislature to pass a New Deal law. Therefore the Federal legislation provides that for 1936 the compact should go into effect if the growers of Georgia form an association to carry out a similar voluntary program and the other two states pass the law.

State compacts for the control of other kinds of tobacco are not expected to go into effect before 1937.

If the New Deal can successfully develop tobacco control by means of the state restriction system, and if it can get another four-year term in Washington, conceivably this tobacco technique will be extended until it includes such major crops as cotton, wheat and corn.

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