Drought hits farmers

Can you imagine a fire, a forest fire, starting outside Paris and ending at Barcelona?

Or, maybe for British listeners, it would be more vivid to imagine starting a fire, starting in a wood outside Edinburgh, that blazed on down past Carlisle, through the Pennines, down through Lancashire, Birmingham, Cheltenham and the Cotswolds, veered into Somerset through Cornwall to Land's End – a barely broken series of forest fires running through a 500-mile corridor.

Well, that's what's happening from the northern tip of Montana, through Idaho and lurching into Oregon, mostly through the heavily forested slopes of the Rockies, all started by lightning storms igniting the dry timber.

I mention this not to wring your withers or jerk your tears, but to note that in a country this size it is not a national disaster or even a lead item in the evening news. It's taking place in the extreme north-western corner of the United States. It was worth a short piece on page 17 of Tuesday's New York Times. Like the appalling drought in the deep South, it's the natives' problems.

But the sorry financial plight of the farmers, especially throughout the Midwest, is, as they say, something else again because whereas the populations of Montana, Idaho and Oregon are comparatively small – they have between them only nine representatives in Congress – three of the big five farming states of the Midwest, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana, have between them 53 congressmen.

So, the unconquerable President Reagan, after submitting to yet another series of nasty medical tests, was on the hop again and off to Chicago where he held a nationally broadcast press conference. I don't think that one has ever been held outside Washington. He went there to emphasise his concern with the main body of American farmers who are in worse shape than they've been since the Great Depression.

Due to the shrinking of farm exports but, in the main, due to the ironical fact that whereas in 1933, in the pit of the Depression, one American in four worked on a farm, today the figure is one in thirty. Yet, this shrunken farmland has, by an incomparable modern technology, produced three or four times as much as it did 50 years ago.

So the farmers are the victims of their own competence. Over-production is their albatross. It was getting to be bad enough in the 1930s, so the government moved in and started the system of subsidising crops and then paying farmers not to grow anything on much of their land. By now, of course, farm subsidies are as much a part of life as social security, never likely to be repealed.

In the early Reagan prosperity, the farmers bought more and more land and then, in the following recession, found they couldn't pay the mortgages. So, one way or another, about one in five is going bust and another two of them are deep in debt.

The Midwest farmers who gave their vote to Reagan so confidently in 1980, a little more grudgingly in 1984, are now begging for the government to do more. They're begging the man who, six years ago, went through the length and breadth of the land, promising 'to take government off your backs'. The farmers, at least, very much want to have the government come and lift surpluses off their backs.

And, as always happens when things are bad, people blame the current administration. This hurts the president deeply, or rather it embarrasses him deeply because his early rhetoric implied – where it didn't say so outright – that the federal government was going to move out of business and agriculture and let good old free enterprise take its vigorous course.

Now, in Illinois, he had to point out that his administration has outdone all previous administrations in throwing money at the farmers, a habit of government he, himself, had scorned as a typical New Deal Democratic (with a capital D) way of driving the nation into unpayable debt.

I don't believe the figures are to be disputed. The president conceded that the farmers are going through tough times, but he pointed out that when he came into office, the federal government's help to farmers was $4 billion. In this fiscal year alone it will disgorge $26 billion, more than any previous administration had spent in its whole four years in office. He added, correctly, that 'no area of the budget, including defence, has grown as fast as our support of agriculture'.

He was asked a question he would most likely have preferred to dodge. How about his signing of a deal for subsidised wheat sales to the Soviet Union? About which, his own Secretary of State Mr George Shultz, had said, 'The Soviet Union must be chortling'. 'Well, of course,' said the president, 'the Soviet Union is our adversary, but Mr Shultz, before he made that remark, had not had a chance to talk to us. And then we didn't do it for the Soviet Union, we did it for our farmers.'

Well, he soldiered on, ending with the rousing phrase, 'Our ultimate aim is economic independence for agriculture, but, and I give you my promise, the nation will see the farmers through'. He got a wave of applause for that.

In the meantime, before the farmers reach the remote and probably unattainable goal of economic independence, the forthcoming harvest is calculated to yield a grain surplus – a surplus – of 120 million bushels, the second largest on record and somebody is going to have to pay heavily to destroy it or store it. That somebody, as every farmer there knew, will not be the Chicago commodity exchange, it will be the federal government, under the farmers' friend, Ronald Reagan who, in theory and in rhetoric, hates the obligation and the practice.

In the meantime, an item it would have been tasteless to bring up in Chicago. The administration has promised that by the end of this fiscal year, the $200 billion-plus federal deficit would be reduced to something like $144 billions, but now the administrations says it's going to wind up at about 170 billions. So, the president and the Congress between them are going to have to slice another 25 billions or so from the budget.

The current trick in Washington is how to do this successfully so that the coming new tax bill, while behaving compassionately towards individuals, towards the poor and the middle-class and small business and big business – towards everybody – will yet enable the Democrats to blame the president for the inevitable budget cuts and the president to blame the Democrats.

The other evening we heard – the night before we saw them – the news that 152 people had been sighted about 12 miles off the coast of Newfoundland sitting in two lifeboats. They were not sailors, they were not fishermen. They were evidently the victims of some doomed ship, but no disaster had been reported anywhere near those waters. Then they were identified as natives of Sri Lanka, what we used to call Ceylon. Ceylon? What were they doing 8,000 miles (is it?) from the Indian Ocean? Overnight it promised a mystery as enthralling as that of the Marie Celeste.

Next day, three Canadian fishing boats picked them up. They were Sri Lankans all right. They had, they said, spent five frightened days and nights drifting in the North Atlantic. Before the doctors and the shore people could get to them, the newspapers of course had to fill in the gaps in our, and their, ignorance. These castaways, we were told, were not in desperate condition, but just suffering from the results of hunger and exposure.

Next night, we saw the pictures of them coming off the boats. They were bad actors. They looked like tourists coming ashore after a rollicking, sunburnt holiday in Hawaii. They were grinning. They were bristling with good humour. They were also in fine health, all but one. The examining doctor was puzzled. Five days and nights at sea, even five days and four nights, tend to induce exhaustion bordering on sulkiness, but their clothes offered no smidge or hint of salt spray. They were dry, even after ferocious rainstorms and, quite cheerfully, they told their story.

They had paid a shipowner, identity unknown, to board his ship, registry unknown or undeclared, between three and five thousand dollars apiece to take them aboard at Madras. That was on 7 July. After five weeks of what could only be called a cruise, they were not driven, but courteously deposited, in the two lifeboats off Newfoundland while the ship beat it into international waters.

Well, the part of their story that seemed to be genuine enough was that they were Tamils, a minority sect that has waged a guerrilla war for the past three years against the Sri Lanka government's Buddhist majority. The Canadians have, before now, given asylum to Tamils but, with this lot, the Canadian government figures it may take about three years of detective work, litigation, contact with proved relatives and so on, before it can decide whether or not to grant them political asylum.

The president's staff in the White House, meanwhile, were on their knees giving thanks to God that the fugitives weren't dumped off the coast of Maine.

Some of you may remember that a few weeks ago, I mentioned the remarkable melodic talent of a mockingbird that haunts or pesters the trees on our terrace overlooking Peconic Bay on Long Island. I say 'the' mockingbird, though they're no rarity – it may be that all summer we've been privileged to listen to the mocking vocal repertory of a whole family. Well, I said that after imitating the songs and cries of every other bird, this one took to mimicking our voices, a gift which is quite usual among the mockingbirds of the north-east.

A week or two ago, I had a letter from a Mr Neal in Rushton, Northamptonshire: 'Dear Sir,' he says, 'I have a parrot who speaks English with an English accent and has a very good vocabulary and memory. For instance, if I ask him to name the 50 states, he will start with Alabama and give all 50 in alphabetical order. He also knows the full names of all 40 presidents and their year of inauguration. If I ask him for number 30, he replies, "Calvin Coolidge 1923". I trust that this information is of interest to you.'

Well, yes, Mr Neal, it is. The puzzle is that Mr Neal has an honest-looking handwriting and if he has such a bird, it ought to be recruited for a Royal Command performance at the Palladium.

About the mockingbird, I was on the level. The question is, Mr Neal, are you?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.