When Shaw Talked To Our Farmers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 95, 18 April 1941, Page 4

When Shaw Talked To Our Farmers

T is improbable that the crisis in the meat and dairying industries has turned our farmers’ minds to G. B. Shaw. But it is a fact that the nimble mind of Shaw was once turned searchingly on our farmers. It will be remembered that Shaw visited New Zealand seven years ago and talked with generous freedom to the newspapers. What he said and why he said it most of us have now forgotten; but no farmer should have forgotten it; and if we remind farmers now that he urged us to drink our own milk and eat our own cheese we are not trying any harder than he did to puil the producer’s patient leg. It is of course elementary that if we drank all the milk produced in New Zealand or ate all the butter and cheese our fate woul be sadder than that of the outback farmers of Australia who go mad (the cynics of Sydney say) by living all day with sheep. We must not go mad, and we must not become lumps of butter-fat; but we must, however dangerous it is, spend most of our time with cows or sheep, and since Hitler is taking advantage of that necessity we must find out how to outwit him. It is true that when Shaw was among us in 1934 such a crisis as we now face seemed a very remote possibility. We were not then thinking of wars, though*some of us may have been thinking of revolutions, and now that war has come Shaw’s suggestions must be adapted to the facts actually facing us. Well, the most dismal of those facts to primary producers is the absence of overseas transport; and it does not matter much to the farmer himself whether he is ruined by the failure of his harvest to reach its markets or by the inability of the markets to take it. When Shaw told us to keep our wool on our own backs, harness our own water power, get our fertilising nitrates from our own air, develop our own manufactures, and eat our own food, he was thinking chiefly of the possibility that Britain might not be able forever to buy what we had to sell. The crisis, as it happens, has come in another way: Britain wants everything that we can produce but because she can no longer take delivery, our farmers are looking across the same blank waters. The moral of course is that a collapsed house is a ruin whether a shell shatters it or an earthquake — and in both cases is the responsibility of the whole community.