THE CONGRESSIONAL agriculture committees learned long ago, when writing farm bills, to include in the same package reauthorization of the food stamp program, also under their jurisdiction. The food stamp provisions helped them pick up urban votes they otherwise might have lost. But this time around, in the House at least, the urban members are being offered less than their votes are worth.

The farm bill written by the House Agriculture Committee gives the food stamps program short shrift. The committee was told it could increase spending on the programs in the bill by $73 billion over the next 10 years. It allotted only about $3 billion of that to food stamps. That's nowhere near enough, given the mauling the program took in the 1996 welfare reform bill. In the Senate, if not on the House floor, supporters should insist that this principal strand of the safety net be restored.

Food stamps are the purest of the federal programs for the poor. To qualify, all a household needs to have is a low income. The program in that sense sets a national income floor, on top of which all other programs build.

The 1996 act greatly weakened the program. The number of people eligible was significantly reduced, mainly by the exclusion of recent immigrants. The program was also rearranged in such a way that fewer of those eligible ended up on the rolls. Families on welfare get food stamps automatically. Families that left welfare in recent years continued to be eligible for food stamps -- most of them, anyway -- but frequently weren't told.

The percentage of eligible people enrolled in the program has thus declined sharply, from 71 percent in 1994 to 59 percent in the most recent data. Among eligible children, the fall-off has been from 86 percent to 69 percent. In addition, benefits were cut in 1996, partly by eliminating an adjustment for inflation.

In the mid-1990s the program helped feed about a tenth of the population, some 27 million people. That's down to about 17 million. Some of that decline was to be expected in an expanding economy, but not the bulk. This was a retrenchment on the government's part, at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in the society, even as other benefits were also being withdrawn. The annual cost of the program declined, from about $25 billion in the mid-1990s to about $15 billion today.

Surely a government that has just seen fit to grant a large tax cut mainly to the very rich can restore a little of that. The proposed payments to farmers in the farm bill are themselves excessive and go mainly to the largest producers least in need.

There are better ways to spend this money. A partial restoration of the stamps program is one of them. The immigrants should be reinstated; a higher share of those eligible should be enrolled; and benefits -- never princely -- should at least be re-tied to inflation. If the agriculture committees won't do that, let them do without the bill. The country would be no worse off.