INCREASING PRIMARY PRODUCTION

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22894, 15 December 1939, Page 15

INCREASING PRIMARY PRODUCTION

TP THE EDITOR Off THE PRESS. Sir,—The bulk of the peo'ple congregated in urban areas and engaged m secondary and tertiary production, want and need the price of food and raw materials to remain low and the price of manufactured goods high. Of course the farmer wants the reverse, and, herein lies the cause of the fundamental conflict between town and country. The farmers’ own sons go to swell the progressively increasing, preponderance of urban population, with its increasingly diversified demands and capacity to meet them. The farmers linger on in the Middle Ages, when the economic pursuit of the vast bulk of the community was agrarian. There must be a modernistic approach to this matter of primary production, somewhat along the broad lines evolved and followed by the industrialists— efficiency in management, economical division of labour, and the maximum use of all scientific aids and. inventions. It is fqr the farmer, as it has been for the industrialist. to make his own' arrangements fair regularising an ample and suitable supply of labour—ln tv free market. He cannot expect the labour market to be so manipulated as to make available to him labour at prices and under conditions incompatible with those ruling elsewhere. It is not a bit of use the farmer squealing about the imposition of higher costs when those costs are the incomes of the bulk of the people, Farm wages must go.up and up. labour conditions improve, land values go down, production stock prices go down and marginal lands go out of ; production and back into forests. The social use of farmers is maximum agrarian production, not, as in the past, a vehicle for aggregation in land" values. Falling the farmers coming to proper realisation and actions, then the State must increasingly step in because not for always will the urbanites suffer tho antiquated ideas and methods of the man on the land. .—Yours, etc., , - * Xj.D. December 14, 1939.