To the Editor:

Every five years, Washington politicians decide that it is political football season in Iowa.

It happens each time Congress sits down to rewrite the federal farm bill, telling everyone in the agricultural community what the government will let them do for the next five years.

We are seeing it again this year. Coupled with the approaching presidential campaign, 1995 is a year when Iowans are going to see a lot of politicians trying to curry favor, grandstand on ethanol, and generally try to politicize what amounts to people’s livelihood in this state.

To my surprise and delight, I’ve found one exception to this pattern. His name is Lamar Alexander. His refreshing approach to agriculture issues make him my candidate for president, but more important, an example to other aspiring politicians how we should be talking about farm issues.

Let me warn you, Alexander is no expert on agriculture policy (although as a two-term governor of Tennessee he has picked up more than a thing or two).

He lives in Nashville and, as a result, doesn’t sit on any of Washington’s powerful agriculture committees. He doesn’t spend time with any of the influential agriculture lobbyists.

But Alexander has had the advantage of living in the real world. He and his wife, Honey, have actually helped start a business that provides child care services to corporations. So when Alexander talks about the issues of concern to farmers, he talks about it in business terms.

“Agriculture is the most productive sector of the American economy,” is his usual opening. He understands that the goal of all agriculture policy is to make American agriculture even more productive.

Cutting capital gains taxes, reforming the punitive estate and inheritance taxes, keeping the government’s commitment to ethanol, knocking down foreign trade barriers, giving farmers the same breaks on health insurance that big companies already have, letting farmers, not Washington, make the key decisions about what they plant.

These are the themes he returns to over and over again because he believes they are the keys to making tho entire economy grow.

In August, he spoke clearly at the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce about the need to look ahead toward a system that escaped the rules and inflexibility of the commodity support program.

He speaks favorably of Senator Grassley’s approach of transitioning out of the current program and moving to a system where farmers have more control over what they grow. But at almost every turn, he insists at looking at farmers as entrepreneurs and risk takers involved in a vital industry.

I think a lot of people, both in Washington and in the farm states, could learn from this approach. Much of the hostility towards the federal agriculture programs stems from the erroneous perception that farmers are merely a special interest group, looking for a government handout.

Yet anyone who has spent time with farmers knows that almost all of them want a chance to compete and expand their share of the market, so long as there is a way of managing their risk.

What is disturbing is that Washington Senators seem prepared to talk about agriculture only in terms of “painful cuts” in this or that federal program. They don’t seem to recognize the economic opportunities that lay ahead for the American farmer.

The world demand for food is going to double in the next 30 years. That represents an unprecedented opportunity for us to become the preeminent supplier of the world’s food. We have to make sure that our farm programs aren’t keeping our production levels artificially low.

We have to make sure that our that our trade policies are aimed at breaking down foreign barriers and subsidies.

Supply and demand. Competition. Deregulation. Selling the best products in the world. The freedom to farm. These are the ideas that should be basis of all our national discussions about the future of agriculture.

We we must show the rest of the country that we really are a productive, energetic, business that fuels the American economy.

That’s why I find Lamar Alexander’s common sense on farmers and farm policy to be so appealing. He sees the Iowa farmer in the same light that he might view the high-tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley or the Saturn auto worker in his home state of Tennessee.

The future of agriculture in this country depends on this sort of perspective.

If we spent more time talking about the market opportunities that are ahead of us and less time debating what one Senator did or did not say about ethanol, we might be able to get the kind of agriculture policy farmers deserve.

Hon. Cooper Evans

Grundy Center, Iowa