"TIMES" AND TARIFFS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 61, 13 March 1934, Page 7

"TIMES" AND TARIFFS

PROTECTING THE FARMER

BACKBONE OF NATION

C'Tlmcs" Cable.J LONDON, March 12. ''Englishmen are so accustomed to healing about excessive Australian, Canadian, and Argentine tariffs on manufactured goods that they do not realise the extent to which industrial countries in recent years have resorted to measures of agrarian protection that make the former seem moderate," says "The Times." "For instance, the price of butter ;u December in London was Gas, compared with 184s in Berlin and Belgium, and 238s in Paris." It is because European Governments sineo the war have regarded the farmer essentially as the backbone of the nation and its defender against Communism that any measure is considered justified if it will keep him happily on the land. The French and German farmers receive three times the price for butter that, New Zealanders obtain, and if present conditions continue, it is easy to visualise Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, and Danes abandoning their farms. "Eemedies are only effectively applicable when Britain and the Dominions have a clearer idea of the objects of their economic policy. The Dominions at Ottawa had "already recognised the necessity for exercising some discrimination in" the encouragement of uneconomic industries, but the recognition still has to find sufficient expression in tariff schedules."