September 5, 1973
Page 28497
FOOD PRICE SPIRAL
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the time we have spent in our home States during the August recess has brought home to all of us the pervasive effects of the rising price of food.
Mrs. Margery Brown of Cherryfield, Maine, took the time to express her frustration in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Butz.
I ask unanimous consent that Mrs. Brown's letter be printed in the RECORD as an example of the depth of the frustration and anger among our constituents over the food price spiral.
There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
CHERRYFIELD, MAINE,
August 17, 1973.
Mr. EARL BUTZ,
Secretary of Agriculture,
Department of Agriculture,
Washington, D.C.
DEAR SIR: Yesterday I went to the nearest city to do my grocery shopping. There wasn't a bag of flour on the shelves. Some stores had been limiting purchases one to a family. Two and five pound bags is an expensive way to buy flour.
Today I read in my local daily newspaper of a bumper crop of wheat. A Farmer Jensen standing in a pile of wheat in South Dakota. He has raised 8000 bushels. No place to store it, the bins are full. No way to ship it, the boxcars aren't available. Wheat is selling for $5 a bushel compared with 1.75 a year ago. Who is making the 3.25? I'll bet it isn't farmer Jensen!
This is America – the land of plenty. Ha! Plenty too many "expert" dingbats trying to manage the economy. They sure have managed to make a mess of it.
For years now the government has been paying a subsidy to the farmers for the grain they raised and another subsidy not to raise grain or graze cattle. We, the taxpayers have paid for it. If there were some way to compute the cost of that performance and add it to the cost of our food purchases, which is what it actually amounts to, considerably more than 19% of our income has been going for food all these years.
Last year President Nixon made a big deal and sent tons of wheat to Russia all in the name of creating better "understanding" between the two countries. The Russian Government would cut our throats in a minute if they didn't need that wheat so desperately. That deal cost me a cent a pound for my bag of flour in the market. Someone made money on the deal and I'll bet it wasn't the Farmer Jensens of this country. That deal smells worse that a bin of rotten grain!
Last fall was a wet harvest season. There was a big fuel shortage flim-flam. There was no gas to run the dryers to dry the grain. There was plenty of gas to heat all these fancy enclosed shopping malls and huge stores. That is more important than drying our grain. That cost me another cent a pound for my flour not to mention the higher costs of other items using grain.
Then the Phase 1 thru 4 price fixing really finished things. The Secretary of the Treasury said that he hoped Phase 5 would be Phase Out. It sure will. The price of all necessities will be phased right out of the reach of many and most of us.
It seems as tho in this day of transportation so good that the local stores now have their winter supply of such "necessities" as snowmobiles, snowmobile suits, etc., on the shelves, that it shouldn't be expecting too much if some of us would prefer to see food on the shelves. Flour isn't the only thing missing, just the most exasperating because we know the wheat is there.
I suppose I should be prepared to pay $7-8 for a 25 lb. bag when it is available considering what happened to the price of eggs and chickens when the farmers killed off all the baby chicks because they couldn't afford grain.
Have you any solution to get that grain from South Dakota to us here in the east? Or should I plan to go to South Dakota with a couple of good solid Maine rocks and grind my own flour.
Yours truly,
Mrs. THURLAND BROWN.