The Daily Alaska empire., 1936-05-30
COP. EFFORT TO GET FARM VOTE

In desperate effort to save some sembance of its erstwhe political influence in the farm belt the Old Guard Republican machine is utilizing it's divers propaganda agencies to picture the Of veritable flood of farm imports produced by Chinese cooies Russian convcts or South Ameri- can peons. An avalanche of pamphlets horde of speakers, an outpouring on the air that starts with the dawn and is not concluded with the twilight harrass the agrarans with warnings that the effect of the Roosevelt agricultural program has been what Messrs Vandenberg and Landon and Knox have characterized "a surrender of the American for farm products" to multiplicity of foreign con- tries that specialize in peasant labor.
 Of this effort to discredit the AAA and its takes no account of the fact that far mers are receiving from 100 to 600 per cent better prices for farm commodities than under Ex- President Hoover and have resumed their rghtful position as consumers in much more contented world So the real objective of the program and its achievement are ignored, but less ignored than are the undis- puted facts to the imports of foreign agricultural products
 For example, first the dimensions of the flood J The total for 1885 1l06 million dollars than during any years since 1880 BUT it was less than in any other year from 1920 to and including 1s3O During most of those II years the value of farm imports was more than two billion dollars annually
  coffee and other products that non-competitve Eliminating those the total was 623 million dollars of which sugar accounted for l34 million
 Naturally the total of 623 million dollars was higher than for the year 1882 when was 296 million and like everything else that year the lowest in generations
 We then come to the items of Argentine corn Canadian cream and the allegedly huge shipments of oats, pork, beef etc. from foreign shores" They are absolutely meaningless in any unbiased consid- eration of the subject because we had drought in 1884 such as we never had before in the recorded history of North America That drought left us with a feed shortage alone of 50 million tons The corn crop reduced in this country a billion bushels Our total food supply half of normal
 We quite naturally and properly bought abroad what the statistics show have been modest amounts of feed grains and livestock products Between July 1884, and December l935, our purchases amounteo to only three and half million >Jns of the 5O-million ton deficiency. And, dscouraging as it doubtles, would be to these faut-fnders if they were actuaec by other than partisan motives it must be added tha the imports of all foreign farm products have great, receded in recent months. Compared with 6OOoOO bushels of oats that in over our tariff wall dur ing the first three months of last year the total portation of oats during the first three months of thi year Il 900 bushels. Imports of that Argentina corn about which Col. Frank Knox has had much t say in his campaign, were 66 per cent less in March 1886 than in March, 1883 Only wheat imports hay not declined proportionally, due to the sprAg whea shortage resulting from the serious rust epidemic last year.
 The answer to this particular campaign of hat products could be absolutely stopped if we return t