BRITISH AGRICULTURE

Hokitika Guardian, 20 February 1930, Page 3

BRITISH AGRICULTURE

LABOUR, POLICY CHANGING

LONDON, Jan. 7

Economic creeds are in the melting pot and it is difficult to know what the future will hold lor us. Certainly ‘‘Socialism in our time” is not to be the Socialism its earlier followers thought of, nor, is the free trade to be the pure essence of Cobtlen. That ueing so, what the present Government, is thinking of with regard to agriculcufe is of more than domestic interest. Its repercussions on Dominion primal \ industries demand that New Zealand should follow—if that be possible in the welter of broken creeds —what is in the present Government’s mind. The pronouncement of one Minister, Mr Arthur Greenwood, Minister of Health, at a University Labour confeicnee as Ruskin College, Oxford, is therefore worth recording, for following oil a speech of Mr J. F. Duncan secretary of the Scottish Farm Workers’ Union, Mr Greenwood declared himself in favour of control of imports. Mr Duncan’s thesis was that the must definitely make up their minds a to the policy in regard to, that indir dry. “We shall have to get away,” In said, “from the free trade do(trines o the Liberals. J am in favour of setting up import boards. We shall how;ever, be looked upon with suspicion. If we say we are going to control imports in the interests of the-farmer, everyone in the towns will he suspicious, while if we say we will do so in the interests of the consumer the farmer will be suspicious.” The arable farmer in this country, said Mr Dundin, had lost confidence in arable farming, and was running away from it afast as he could. The problem was not only an economic one, hut a human problem. They must give farmers who were willing to organise markets the assurance that they would have sufficient credit available to carry over their crops without the necessity of immediate marketing. Mr "Greenwood said that My Duncan had not elaborated sufficiently his idea of the control of imports. There would he difficulties about an import board. The 00-operative Wholesale Society, which was probably the largest wheat importer in this country, did not smile upon the proposal, but at a recent conference the society’s representatives had admitted that the present state of disorganisation was not one which could last permanently. The price of wheat, like the price of coal, was uneconomic-ally low, and he did not see how they could let things drift. Laisser faire had landed us into these troubles, said the Minister of Health. Laisser faire, then, we must' fake it, must go! .....