Farm Foreclosures Will Increase

Foreclosures on farms will leave one million workers jobless, making this the most devastativng year for farmers since the Great Depression, participants in a Harvard student-sponsored Agricultural Law Symposium said yesterday.

The number of farm foreclosures will rise to 100,000 this year as a result of farmers' decreasing incomes and their subsequent inability to repay loans, said symposium organizer Harry R. Bader, a first-year law student. This crisis will cause almost half of America's 2.3 million farmers to lose their land, making 1986 "the worst year since the Great Depression," he said.

The law and business student-sponsored conference drew speakers including Gov. George Sinner of North Dakota, agricultural economists from various universities, and a Nebraska farming family, who suggested a variety of solutions to the current farm debt crisis.

A recent Department of Agriculture study revealed that the cost of operating a farm exceeds the market price for farm produce. This is in part due to the Federal Farm Bill, passed in December, which lowered the government- set market price for farm goods.

Sinner said that the state-owned banking system of North Dakota was successful in easing the farmers' plight within the state because, unlike commercial banks, it could manipulate the interest rate it granted in favor of farmers.

However, the symposium's moderator, Cathleen Kelley, said the non-profit banking system will not solve the crisis. "If nothing is done [to allieviate the farming situation], it will destroy whole communities in North Dakota," she said.

Several speakers, including Sinner, agreed that interest rates, which are traditionally blamed for the debt crisis, are not the only cause. The current farm problems are mainly a result of the Reagan Administration's "screwed up" fiscal policy, Sinner said.

The Reagan Administration has decreased subsidies to farmers and eased price supports as part of the President's commitment to free trade.

Barry Flinchbaugh, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, said the Reagan policy has forced thousands of farmers to go out of business. "You don't talk free trade to a man with an empty belly," he said. "You feed him."

Bader said the current policy is encouraging the "destruction of a culture" because it facilitates the expansion of corporate farming at the expense of family farming.

Nebraska farmer Lucille Bruns said that for the farmer, the family farm is "not just his home--it's his whole livelihood."

Bruns said that when farmers lose their jobs, they are "leaving a way of life," and that most of them cannot find work, have no other training, or are too old to retrain and too young to retire.

Sinner said these farm problems are "bound to cause a change of vote from Republican to Democrat in the farm states in '88."

The farm states may not have a great impact on the presidential race, however, because the eight states with farming populations of more than 5 percent control only 66 of the nation's 538 electoral votes.