The Press SATURDAY, MARCH 2, 1946. Wheat

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24814, 2 March 1946, Page 6

The Press SATURDAY, MARCH 2, 1946. Wheat

The Minister of Supply, the Hon. D. G. Sullivan, would have put him- ■ self in a very strong position over . the wheat price if he had been con- ; tent to say some of the things he has recently said and to rest there. If he had said merely that he had asked the wheatgrowers to state a complete case for their 8s demand and that they had not responded; that Mr R. T. McMillan had admitted the difficulty of producing evidence of increased costs to justify 8s a bushel; and that in these circumstances the Economic Stabilisation Commission, after exhaustively reviewing the facts, had decided on 7s Id as a price which would cover production costs (and expectable increases) and capital charges and allow a fetter than normal return—if Mr Sullivan had said as much as this and no more, it would have been hard (but not impossible) to get under his guard. But he said a great deal more, exposing in the result the inconsistency of two lines of argument. Along one of them, Mr Sullivan moved to the conclusion that self-sufficiency in wheat is unattainable without upsetting the rotational basis of New Zealand farm practice and impairing the “ long-run efficiency ’’ of other classes of farm production. It was in full consistency with this argument, which is in fact a powerful one, that the Minister spoke of fixing a price which would cover the production and capital charges of “ reasonably efficient ” wheatgrowing and leave a fair profit margin; for the underlying assumption is, of course, that wheat will and should be regularly raised only on a more or less constant acreage of suitable land, the management of which is regulated accordingly. In other words, on balance it is normally best for New Zealand to grow from half to three-fifths of its wheat, under fair protection, and to import the rest; and that is the Government’s policy. But Mr Sullivan had much more to say, and another definition of policy. The world food shortage is grave. The Government feels “ obliged to relate

“ its agricultural policy ” to that fact »and to the certainty—which emerges from all the perplexities and obscurities pondered by Mr Sullivan—that in 1947 there will still be “ a general shortage ”, There is only one waj> to relate Government policy to the present fact and the emerging certainty: that is, to make sure that New Zealand makes no claim, or the least possible claim, on the r< pt of the world’s wheat. Mr Sullivan himself, after reviewing (in the dark) the harvests of North America. Europe, Australia, and Argentina, said this plain word:

Even so. we cannot be sure that the wheat problem will have been solved in 1947. and therefore we need to do our best through greater acreage to lessen oyr demands for supplies from oversea.

But the truth of this invalidates the Minister’s argument about the limits of self-sufficiency, long-term efficiency, ano all the rest of it. The truth of this is that present policy cannot be shaped to long-run ends and op long-run principles. If the need is acreage, and all the evidence affirms it and the Minister endorses it, then, either by fixed price or by variable price or by special growing contracts or by control under local wheat com mittees or by any other ad hoc devices that will work, that acreage must be pursued and obtained. There is more than a little in the Minister’s statement to suggest that 7s Id will sow 200,000 acres; there is nothing whatever to raise the hope of its sowing 200,000 acres.