MORE FEDERAL SPENDING NOT ANSWER FOR FARM PRICES

President Clinton vetoed an emergency farm-aid bill on grounds that the $4.2 billion measure didn't spend enough money. Clinton held out for spending more than $7.3 billion. The congressional plan consisted of a mix of disaster relief and $1.7 billion in direct payments to farmers.

As has been noted in these pages before, farm prices and the farming economy have collapsed to disastrous levels. This is a result of the coincidence of several factors. These include bad weather in certain sectors leading to horrendous yields, as against bumper crops in sectors more favored by the weather, with attendant low prices, an all-too-familiar scenario in the Farm Belt.

Compounding all this is a global phenomenon hitting American agribusiness doubly hard: the contraction of the Asian economies, which have been markets of increasing importance for American producers. Long-term recovery isn't likely until we see improvement in the Far East.

In the meantime, the Clinton proposal to spend nearly twice as much as Congress proposed isn't any kind of answer. Probably the best thing the federal government could do to assist farm prices is to promote foreign trade as aggressively as possible. More priming of the federal spending pump is a discredited quick fix that won't work.

We need leadership, both in opening foreign markets to our agricultural products, and in encouraging Japan and the other Asian economies to get their houses in order.