ADVICE TO FARMERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 January 1941, Page 9

ADVICE TO FARMERS

BERNARD SHAW AGAIN “TAKE A LEAF OUT OF STALIN’S BOOK.” NEW ECONOMIC POLICY. Mr Bernard Shaw, in a letter to "The Times," admits that he was wrong when he declared many years, ago that what agriculture needed was a minimum wage of two guineas a week for farm labourers. Jesse Collings was also wrong when he advocated three acres and a cow for every cultivator of the land. "Three acres and a cow will no more make a man a farmer than one acre and a telescope will make him an astronomer." writes Mr Shaw. "We were all wrong in assuming that the question was one of the remuneration of the labourer What we should have studied, and never did, were the qualifications of the farmer. Nothing of any importance was done until the Russian revolution in 1917. "The Bolshevist leaders tackled the problem vigorously. On principle they began by seizing all the prosperous farmers and throwing them out on the roads as exploiters. Kulaks they called them. The result was that Russia began to starve.

Lenin saw that this would not do. He again seized as many as he could find of the dejected Kulaks and threw them back into their farms, with

orders to carry on as before This was the New Economic Police.

"But the restored Kulaks, deprived of all conviction of security and intensely resentful of their former treatment, would not carry on as before. They ate their seeds and killed their livestock until nothing was left beyond their bare subsistence. They even created local artificial famines in which they themselves perished. Russia was still half starved.

"Clearly this would not do. either. But Lenin's death hung the question up until the struggle for direction between Trotsky and Stalin ended, leaving Stalin as the winner. He found the solution in collective farming. State and co-operative, but mainly co-opera-tive. It has been enormously successful

"The moral is that, instead of wasting our energies in abusing Stalin, wo must take a leaf out of his book and organise our agriculture on modern lines, as he has done.

"Why is our system impossible? The answer is so obvious that no one notices it. We leave the whole vital business to individual farmers without the smallest inquiry into their qualifications. "We expect every farmer to be able single-handed not only to plough and hoe. to reap and sow. but to be an agricultural chemist, veterinary biologist. an accountant dealing with complicated costings, a statistician, a man of business skilled in buying materials and selling products/ an up-to-date reader of Lord Bledisloe and thescientific investigators, and an export in half a dozen other capacities utterly foreign to his antecedents. "Farms of hundreds and even thousands of acres arc as secondary now as industrial capitals on the same scale. When we face the necessity for cultivating these isles by the million acres we shall get a move on; and Stalin may stop laughing at us"