While the activities of the Agriculture Department don’t always garner a lot of attention, a highly questionable decision it recently made to help wealthy speculators could, over time, cost anyone who buys food. But while the decision — a big win for high-frequency traders at the expense of farmers, food companies, and the public — is consequential, its effects have hardly been reported.

First, some history is in order. In 1905, a government statistician was caught leaking numbers related to the cotton crop. While Agriculture Department employees finalized statistics in a locked room, the informer would walk over to the window and raise or lower the blinds, depending on whether the forecast was above or below a predetermined figure. His accomplice outside would then dart off to trade on the information before it was publicly released. The duo netted several hundred thousand dollars this way until the scandal broke.

The government responded forcefully. President Roosevelt ordered his administration to launch a full investigation into the affair and to prosecute any official involved. The House and Senate both unanimously passed a bill making premature disclosure of agriculture statistics a crime. Nobody needed to argue that the scheme had inflated cotton prices or swindled the public. The issue was fairness. As Agriculture Secretary James Wilson wrote, “We take the ground here that nothing goes out unless it goes to the whole people. We have no favorites.”

In the century since, officials have heeded Wilson’s rule, often stringently; in the 1940s a New York Times reporter likened the protections to those around an atom bomb. Today elaborate security regimes continue to surround routine releases of government numbers on crops, as well as other figures like unemployment reports.

But recently a combination of corporate decisions and fumbling regulators has undone the equal access to this information, which our predecessors so carefully crafted. The new arrangement advantages nobody but the same sophisticated speculators that officials suspect might be illegally manipulating prices. And yet, despite vigorous complaints from the people who actually grow and use our grains, regulators have — for all intents — abandoned this century-old policy.

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