Mikhail Gorbachev has of late offered to set Soviet farmers free of the state. ''We proceed ! now[ from the assumption that no one should interfere in the day-to- day economic activities'' of farmers, he is reported as saying live, prime-time, on nationwide TV.

Such a proposal would be met with utter incomprehension, if not fury, were it put to Canadian farmers, even if it wasn't pre-empting Cosby. The idea of giving up the vast array of government subsidies, price supports, crop insurance, and other transfers from the population at large would never occur to the 293,000 sturdy entrepreneurs in the agricultural industry.

This particular form of privilege was worth, after all, more than $6 billion in federal spending alone in 1988. Almost $4 billion of that went to grain farmers, or more than $30,000 per farmer. Subsidies to dairy farmers claim another $300 million. This is not counting another $900 million in rail-freight subsidies, nor the hundreds of millions of dollars the provinces dish out.

There is little question of any of this form of collectivized agriculture disappearing soon. Where do you think we are, Russia? It does not matter that in most years, farmers make more on average than the population forced to support them. Farm subsidies are as Canadian as, well, industrial subsidies.

Yet the most indefensible form of farm privilege of all may indeed be blighted with a dose of perestroika. The time is fast approaching when we shall have to take a hard look at reform of the price-fixing racket known as supply management.

PUSHING UP PRICES

This is not because we need to look after the food processing industry, now facing untariffed competition from the south: if it was a choice between the farmers and McCain's, I'd send the processors to the wall first. Nor is it because of free trade: the agreement explicitly protects supply management quotas and the import controls needed to maintain them.

Nor is it because we will likely face pressure to abandon supply management in coming multilateral negotiations on liberalizing world trade in farm products. It is rather for the cause of consumers in general, and of the poor in particular.

Through a web of fixed prices, supply quotas, and import controls, these schemes are responsible for pushing the price of milk, eggs, chicken and turkey substantially above prices in the U.S. A 1987 Organization for Economic Co- operation & Development report calculated that chicken quotas alone cost consumers $129 million - in 1981.

Sooner or later, the pressure for reform is going to be overwhelming, even against the immensely powerful farm lobby. If one wanted to be hard-headed about this, one would point out that farming is a business, like any other. We do not engage in elaborate schemes to protect the family restaurant, or the family courier, or the family brokerage. Yet these may have as much emotional and financial investment as any farm.

As logical as this proposition may be, you will never get Jane Fonda and Jessica Lange to testify before Congress on its behalf. Emotional scenes will be conjured of the hardships family farmers will endure, and of the importance to the social fabric of preserving this way of life. So I have an alternate proposal, one that is impervious to all objections.

Hire them. Turn them into civil servants. If the family farm is a way of life worth preserving, then I am willing to see my tax dollars pay the salaries of the custodians of this heritage. I am not willing to see my food dollars, and I am outraged to see the food dollars of the poor, fattening the incomes not only of the struggling farmer, but the rich farmer, the weekend farmer, and the corporate farmer besides. Pay them a modest basic wage, and let prices float where they may.

Lest anyone dare protest that this would be tantamount to putting farmers on welfare: they are on welfare now. The only reason we use these methods rather than simply sending farmers a cheque is to convince ourselves that we can intervene without really intervening, that farmers are still earning a market income, though market prices and quantities be distorted from their true values.

But if the result of this is to produce massive surpluses in some markets, inflated prices in others, and both in others still, all to no purpose but to boost the incomes of everyone who calls himself a farmer without regard to need, then it's long past time the charade was ended.