What a shame.

Congress last week missed one of those rare chances to change how we think about the way the world works. It happened when the House and Senate passed a five-year farm bill that will guarantee about $40 billion in subsidies for a handful of crops like corn.

Legislators evidently plan on keeping the blinders on, too. Both chambers apparently have the votes to override President Bush's promised veto.

The old way of seeing farm bills was more in terms of domestic benefits. Capitol Hill thought mostly about helping farmers in the Texas Panhandle, on the plains of the Dakotas or across the fields of Kansas. Farmers, after all, have political clout.

There's a new way to see farm policy, however, and it revolves around connecting the developed world to the developing world. More than ever, ag policies shape everything from how crops grown in Texas and Kansas affect food prices in Egypt, Haiti and Cambodia.

Bush gets the picture. So do some legislators, like Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana and Demo-cratic Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin. They pushed for a more economically efficient way of farming, including doing away with subsidies for farmers who make as much as $750,000, after expenses.

Unfortunately, the farm lobby prevailed. David Beckmann, president of the hunger charity Bread for the World, told me that he met only one legislator who told him he was wrong to lobby for reforming farm payments. The rest told him he was right but that they couldn't go against the farm lobby.

U.S. consumers will pay for the old view prevailing. So will people around the globe.

Here's one example: Rising grain prices are driving up prices for everything from bread to pasta. This is bad enough news for our country, where food inflation has been running about 5 percent.

It's doubly bad in developing nations, where food prices have caused riots.

Some corn producers I met with last week say we can't blame all the problems on them. True, but crop subsidies don't help the situation.

Short of letting the president's veto stand, Congress can't change the farm bill now. But it still can redeem itself.

The president recently proposed $770 million in food aid to help developing countries weather this deadly food crisis. Congress is considering that proposal, plus more money, to combat hunger worldwide.

But an old paradigm is at work here, too: U.S. law requires that American farmers supply nearly all the food in our aid packages. What's more, the bulk of the assistance must be shipped to Africa, Haiti and points across the globe on U.S. ships.

As Beckmann points out, this only adds to the cost for other nations, and Bush agrees. He wants Congress to devote 25 percent of its food aid package to buying crops from local farmers in nations we're trying to help. He also wants shippers outside the U.S. to transport our packages.

Why would a farmer in Dumas, Texas, want to go along with this change? Why would he want to give a farmer in Mali the chance to grow the corn he's now growing in the Panhandle?

I put that question to Beckmann, and he had a compelling answer.

The more nations in Africa can make a living growing their own crops, the more those nations grow a middle class. The more they grow a middle class, the more demand they will have for better foods. The more need they have for better foods, the more demand they will have for what farmers in Dumas produce.

As an example, he pointed to Asia's growth in the 1990s. As Asia made rapid progress in curtailing poverty, our farmers had bigger markets to serve.

There are some signs that Capitol Hill will go with Bush on a new way of thinking about food aid. After failing so dramatically on the farm bill, they sure need to redeem themselves. The old way of seeing food and agricultural policies doesn't fit the world in which we live.

William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News.