CROP FAILURES

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 57, Issue 249, 2 August 1937, Page 3

CROP FAILURES

CANADA’S ECONOMIC PLIGHT. LANDS REDUCED TO DUST. OTTAWA, July 19. Crop failures in Western Canada con - stitute the Dominion’s most immediate and pressing problem. So gravely is the situation viewed that the Prime Minister, Mr Mackenzie King, immediately after his nationwide broadcast on Canada’s affairs, will visit Saskatchewan and Alberta, the present scene of the sharpest singlo economic disaster in this Dominion’s history. There is not only a major crop failure in Western Canada but the devastation is so widesrpead and the relief required must he on such a vast scale that the resources of' the Dominion will be strained to the utmost. The Province of Saskatchewan has witnessed previous crop failures. In fact, some parts of that territory have failed during the last five or six years to give paying yields, but this season the entire countryside is so completely devastated that it is a grave question whether it can ever again be re-estab-lished. A district 500 miles long and 200 miles wide, and thickly settled with what were formerly magnificent farms, has been reduced to desert wilderness and sand dunes. Not one quarter of the food required for the live-stock is contains has been grown there. For weeks on end the thermometer has ranged wound 100 degrees. No rain has fallen and the sunbaked lands are reduced to dust, which has just blown away. \ Not one in 10 of the 500,000 population is to-day self-supporting. Huge sums will be required for immediate relief, and officials of the 'Government believe that thousands ot people must be permanently moved out from districts that cannot for years support any living thing.