One, doesn't it appear to be better to incorporate all of these many programs into one piece of legislation in one agency, and, two, if that is not possible, can we please work out some better devices for coordinating these programs so that the communities will be able to know better where to go to get the money that they so desperately need to construct these sewers and water pollution abatement projects. Secretary FREEMAN. Well, No. 1, if the communities-we have made a real effort to do this and I think have worked out the relationship. If the community is 5,500 or fewer in population, it would come within the province of the Farmers Home Administration and assuming that it can qualify for a loan there and assuming further that we have some funds left, that loan ought to be forthcoming.

Now, if there is a technical difficulty of some kind which disqualifies but might not in another program or if funds are not available and might be in another program, this is an open question depending upon the circumstances.

But I would say to you, Congressman, that if there is one of these communities that does not know where to go here, we would hope we could be of assistance because it ought to start in the Department of Agriculture.

Mr. DINGELL. My problem is that by the time they finish running between the different places, the money is all gone.

This is a very serious problem.

Now, Secretary Weaver has been very helpful to me and made available a very generous grant to one of my communities for a community program. But it was through a special kindness from his office that we were able to get the redtape cut. I still have the fundamental problem of having the people chase back and forth to obtain this money.

I think this is a very great problem that merits the attention of you gentlemen in the Cabinet so that these four programs can be sufficiently coordinated that when representatives from a small town come here they will know which of the agencies they should contact to get the money. I feel so strongly about this that I have introduced legislation to have them all administered by one agency.

It is a matter of really small concern which agency administers them as long as we get one place for them to go.

I think this is a problem you are going to face not just on air pollution or water pollution but everywhere. There is such a tremendous number of Federal programs that we have to give serious thought to getting related programs in one place so we do not go from Agriculture to HUD to HEW to Interior. It is pretty hard for a Member of Congress with 13 communities to figure out where to send his people and how to get some money before it runs out.

Secretary FREEMAN. I would say better than that, it should not be necessary for people to have to come to Washington at all. Certainly there are very, very few instances that an application for an FHA loan comes to Washington. The Administrator of that program-Howard, how many programs come to Washington of the 1,700 that we made last year roughly?

Mr. BERTSCH. Ten percent perhaps, Mr. Secretary.

Secretary FREEMAN. Well, that is a higher number than I thought but these ought to be done and done locally and they ought not to be that complicated, and

Mr. DINGELL. I don't want to transgress on the committee's time. I know Secretary Weaver has been very patient. But I am sincerely troubled about this fact, and I want my people to come to Washington so that I can help them and watch over them and see that things go the way they should go for them.

But I am greatly troubled. This is not the only area where we have this where-do-we-go-to-get-the-money problem. I think I am as astute about getting money as anybody else around here, but the truth is we have so many places to go that it is really hurting the programs. I think, Mr. Secretary, this is something both of you very fine gentlemen should look at very carefully when you get back down

town.

Secretary FREEMAN. Thank you.

Mr. KLUCZYNSKI. Thank you, Mr. Dingell.

We also have with us Mr. Mize, a Representative from Kansas who is very much interested in small businessmen. He is not going to ask any questions, cooperating with the chairman.

At this time I yield to my very good friend, Mr. Burton of Utah. Mr. BURTON. Mr. Chairman, I won't take any time other than to say that I think you put your finger on one of our major national problems, Mr. Secretary. I come from a State that is suffering under the situation you have described.

Thank you for your statement.

Secretary FREEMAN. Thank you.

Mr. KLUCZYNSKI. Mr. Secretary, we are glad to have you with us. I want to thank you. Your testimony is going to help this committee when we sit in executive session.

Secretary FREEMAN. I want to thank you for your courtesy. It has been a pleasure to be here and I leave Mr. Weaver to your very generous, kindly, perceptive, intelligent, penetrating remarks.

Mr. KLUCZYNSKI. He is a great man.

Additional material submitted by Secretary Freeman will, without objection, be inserted in the record at this point. (The information referred to follows:)

THE ISSUE OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT: COMMUNITIES OF TOMORROW1

We are now seven years into the seventh decade of the Twentieth Century, poised at a point in time when fundamental, widespread and irreversible change in the fabric of the United States is occurring daily.

Thirty-three years ahead of us lies the dawn of a new century. And if that date has the ring of the far-distant future, it might be well to recall just how short a period three decades really is.

We are equidistant in time today from the year 2000 and the year 1934, the second year of the New Deal. Rural America then, as now, was in crisis, but of a different order-a crisis highly visible, affecting almost the total rural population, and part of a larger economic crisis affecting the entire Nation.

The Nation responded to this crisis, creating agencies and programs to conserve the soil, to bring electricity to the countryside, to bring agricultural supply and demand in balance, and a host of other measures which fundamentally altered the condition of American life.

1 Address by Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman at Conference on Rural Poverty, sponsored by National Association for Community Development, Marriott Motor Inn, Twin Bridges, Arlington, Va., January 30, 1967.

What we did then profoundly affected what we are today.

Now, 33 years later, we face crisis of another order-just as acute, just as widespread as the crisis in the thirties, but with this fundamental difference: Today's crisis in rural America is a hidden crisis, largely invisible, and largely overshadowed by other, more spectacular problems at home and abroad.

DIMENSIONS OF THE CRISIS

The dimensions of the crisis are well known to all of you who are deeply involved in rural development. They consist of too little of everything-jobs, income, education, and services-in rural America, and a continuing one-way flow of people from country to city, damaging to country and city alike.

The crisis is neither simple nor easy of solution. It is complex, multi-faceted, and feeds upon itself. Less economic opportunity in rural America means fewer jobs; underemployment means a lower tax base; a lower tax base means poorer community facilities and education; crippled education and facilities bring the problem full circle by discouraging industry from locating in rural areas.

The result has been a rural America with space to spare, but starved for opportunity—and paradoxically an urban America with oportunity for the many, but starved for space for her residents to move in, to enjoy, to breathe.

Rural residents have roughly half the number of doctors per 100,000 people as city people; a third of the number of dentists. The amount of underemployment in rural America is equivalent to 2.5 million unemployed. 6.8 million rural homes are in need of repairs and 30.000 rural communities need improved water and sewer systems. The educational achievement rate is some two years behind that of urban America and the dropout rate is 7 percent higher than in urban

areas.

THE CITY TODAY

An unplanned policy of exporting rural problems to the city has drawn urban America into the rural crisis. For the affluent of the city, the unchecked migration means more crowding, higher taxes, more hours consumed in commuting as urban sprawl continues unabated. For migrants already in the teeming ghettos, further immigration means less opportunity and rising despair. One urban observer put it this way:

"Our cities exact too much from those who live in them. They are not only increasingly expensive places in which to live or work; more and more, the price of city living is being paid by a sacrifice of fundamental personal freedoms:" The author of these words is no agrarian fundamentalist; he is Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York City.

THE CITY TOMORROW

By the turn of the century, if present trends continue unchecked, Mayor Lindsay's New York will have become part of a super megalopolis stretching from present-day Boston south to Washington, D.C., and containing 56 million people. This strip city, and 4 other strips like it, will house 174 million Americans on urbanized land ranging in density from 660 to 2,600 people per square mile.

Residents of these 5 super strip cities and other urbanized areas will get up earlier, spend more time breathing their neighbors' car exhaust and return home later. Superhighways and mass transit systems will soak up increasing amounts of urban land in a frantic race to keep the city mobile. If past trends are an indication, crimes of violence will increase as urban life becomes increasingly more depersonalized and hopeless for the disadvantaged.

Nor can we count with any certainty on being rescued by technology from such a reckless concentration of people, vehicles and industry. The number of automobiles is increasing at a rate twice that of U.S. population. By the year 2000 we will have an estimated 200 million cars in the U.S.-nearly 3 times as many as today. With this many mobile pollution sources crowded into 9 percent of the land area, even the most stringent anti-pollution ordinances will do little more than preserve the status quo, if that. Pollutants produced by industry, sewage plants and land development, will increase apace.

This is the world we're building, simply by allowing present trends to continue to their logical conclusion-for powerful, yet unplanned, forces are tending in the direction of even further imbalance.

CENTRALIZATION FACTORS

1. One of these is tradition. The farm-to-city migration has been under way for a hundred years or more. Cities have traditionally offered better wages, education, community facilities, and cultural activities than rural areas. Both the city and the countryside have undergone tremendous change in recent years, and now many rural communities offer as much as the central city . . . and a great deal more that the urban complex cannot offer. Yet the tug of traditional thinking is strong, both on the average citizen and on those who make the plantlocation decisions.

2. A second factor encouraging centralization can be summed up as, "them as has, gits." Those areas which already have industry attract more, and this in turn attracts even more. The sprawling electronics complex in Southern California is an example. Although overcrowding, increased taxation and snarled transportation in urban areas are making rural locations increasingly attractive, the lure of established commerce still is a powerful force.

3. A third factor is negative, but quite possibly more important than the other two combined: We lack any accepted national goal in rural/urban balance. We have never seriously asked-let alone answered-questions like these: "What is a desirable maximum size for any one metropolitan area?" "How much weight should be given to rural/urban balance in the location of government facilities and awarding of contracts?" "Are more Federal incentives desirable to encourage rural development? If so, how much?" "What are the social costs involved in this unplanned population shift?"

In the absence of a national policy in this matter, decisions in industrial location, government installations, contract awards, and government program expenditures all tend to favor urban areas.

A continued unplanned stacking up of more people in urban areas, at the expense of rural areas, is a national drift that bodes ill for the future. No one planned it this way; like Topsy, "It just grew." Nobody really wants an America of super strip cities, dotted with explosive and squalid ghettoes. is not too much to call such a drift "national idiocy," and it does no good to offer palliatives and pills to cure a disease which has literally assumed epidemic proportions.

THE NEW AWARENESS

It

Working against this centralizing drift, fortunately, is the flickering beginning of a national awareness of the relationship between urban and rural problems, and a growing commitment to meeting the problems in rural America, rather than exporting them.

Author J. P. Lyford, in his book on the New York slums, "The Airtight Cage," articulates this new awareness by asking:

"Why, for instance, must huge concentrations of unemployed and untrained human beings continue to pile up in financially unstable cities that no longer have the jobs, the housing, the educational opportunities, or any of the other prerequisites for a healthy and productive life? Why do we treat the consequences and ignore the causes of massive and purposeless migration to the city? Why are we not developing new uses for those rural areas that are rapidly becoming depopulated? Why do we still instinctively deal with urban and rural America as if they were separate, conflicting interests when in fact neither interest can be served independently of the other?"

The President, speaking last September in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, said: "Not just sentiment demands that we do more to help our farms and rural communities. The welfare of this Nation demands it. . . Must we export our youth to the cities faster than we export our corps and our livestock to market? I believe we can do something about this."

We can :

Urban America, according to its spokesmen, can easily absorb one trillion dollars to make existing cities livable. Certainly we should bend every effort to make them livable. But at the same time we should devote much more to building rural America than we have done in the past, to head off even more virulent attacks of urban decay occasioned by uncontrolled growth in the future. Doing this will cost less and get better results.

AGRICULTURE AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT

Basic to any discussion of this rural development is agriculture-because a healthy argricultural plant provides an underpinning to support the rural economy. This basic resource is in a very different position today than it was 5 years ago, or even 12 months ago:

1. Food surpluses have disappeared, and an end to surpluses in cotton and tobacco is within grasp. Our reliance now is on stored acres and improved technology to produce for need, rather than on stored commodities.

2. Farm income, both gross and net, has increased markedly. Last year gross income was the highest in history and net income was the second highest. In the 6 years since 1960, $31.8 billion more in gross income has been pumped into the rural economy, over and above what would have been earned had 1960 levels continued.

3. Demand for agricultural products is strong and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Exports during 1966 totaled some $6.9 billion and should surpass $7 billion this year.

4. The free market, much praised but little used during the fifties, is now freer of government controls than it has been in decades.

5. Our commodities are moving in the world market at world prices, because of an aggressive public and private market development program and because of pricing policies designed to meet competition.

6. Of great significance is the accelerated graduation into “adequate size" class by family farms in recent years. One measure of “adequate size" is gross sales of $10,000 a year or more. Since 1959, nearly 200,000 farm families have moved into that class.

But let me be emphatically clear at this point: Despite steady progress the last 6 years, the farmer's income still lags far behind that of other Americans.

On a per capita basis, the farmer's income is $1,700. Other Americans average $2,610 per capita.

Farm prices, though up last year, have been down the last few months, and today are less than the 1947-49 average. At the same time, food costs are 35 percent higher.

This the farmer bitterly resents-and properly so.

This discrepancy must be corrected. It must be corrected because it is unfair to the farmer and therefore wrong. It must be corrected because if farmers don't get a fair return commensurate with the other segments of society, we will lose our best farmers. If that happens the entire Nation, not just the farmer, will be hurt.

In addition, more financing and technical assistance, both public and private, should be extended to farmers presently in the "less-than-adequate" size, to allow those farmers to expand operations and to take advantage of modern technology. In other words, we should continue to keep the door open for those who wish to remain in commercial agriculture.

Yet there are many operators who do not wish to expand, or lack the capacity to, because of age, physical disability, grossly inadequate resources, or other limitations. It is critically important that there be a place for these farmers in rural America also-for urban America has no place for him.

Take the case of a man 45 years old whose farm has failed. The small town where he's done his modest shopping has no job for him, nor are there any within commuting range. And so, in a desperate search for work, he moves to the city.

He has no money, so he doesn't have much of a choice in housing . . . he settles in the decayed heart of the city. His limited education puts him out of the running for a job. His limited skills are useless in the city . . . for who needs a man to plow a straight furrow in an asphalt field?

He is one of thousands . . . all disenchanted, all strangers in a strange land. Families break asunder; children are infected with the virus of the ghetto and yet another generation is crippled. This is the human cost we're talking about. It is true that our farm commodity programs have helped the less-than-adequate farmer-to an extent. From 1959 through 1965 the class of farmers with gross incomes below $10,000 yearly increased their per farm net income by some 19 percent. Their off-farm income, with greater job opportunities in recent years, increased some 30 percent. Yet their earnings are far from adequate, and it is unrealistic to expect the farmer with "40 acres and a mule" to enter the mainstream of commercial agriculture.