Farmers' Ills and Remedies.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20551, 20 May 1932, Page 10

Farmers' Ills and Remedies.

The annual conference of the North Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Farmers' Union yesterday showed again how anxious is the position of the primary producer. It showed also that farmers are thinking harder than ever they thought, and turning for help to theorists-and researchers, in the end the most practical men; and this is deeply encouraging. But there were signs also of an impatience which cannot be successfully'allied with thinking. It is true that after two years of a desperate struggle to hold out for real relief impatience cannot very well bo blamed. Many farmers, whatever they do, cannot last much longer without a distinct improvement in their markets, sufficient to restore at any rate a minimum working margin. But a little more patience is possible and necessary, and it is not shown by passing resolutions -which suggest that farmers expect the influence of wagecuts to be more rapid than it can be. In the first place, phrases such as "no material reduction" are of no value until they are denned in figures. In the second, all such readjustments are necessarily slow, but that they have been going on is beyond question. Third, they have been given and will be given further impetus, from which farmers may expect-increasing benefit; and at the same time further relief will bo gained from the mortgage and rent provisions of the Expenditure Adjustment Act. No doubt farmers know this as well as any man, though with more reason than most they want not only to be helped but to be helped quickly; but it is at least indiscreet not to calculate the effect on wageearners and others of a resolution which appears to tell them that their sacrifices are worth very little where, ultimately, t.hey ought to be worth most. The same haste appeared, not in the central recommendation of " a search"ing investigation" into the possibilities of subsidising secondary industries, but in the enlargement of the resolution and in the arguments that supported it. Subsidies are of course cheaper, very often, than tariffs, easier to control and to lift and to measure in their effects, and hai'der to abuse; but nothing could be much wilder than a vision of "thousands" of people reabsorbed into industries supported on Unemployment Board subsidies. There may be a case for the subsidising of a few, carefully selected industries—perhaps even from the Fund; and one | experiment of the sort was undertaken, or planned, by the first Board, in 1931. But the conference yesterday can hardly have considered that the Board's problem is that of providing for 50,000 men out of £3,500,000; and.that a heavy subsidy to one industry would not go very far, little subsidies to many industries would go no farther, and heavy subsidies to a lot of industries would go far enough to break everybody, and the fanners first.