BRITISH FARMERS ANXIOUS

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24866, 4 May 1946, Page 3

BRITISH FARMERS ANXIOUS

GOVERNMENT POLICY CHANGE

A rather gloomy picture of the .present state of mind of the United Kingdom farming industry is given by an Engish writer in commenting on the British Government’s sudden decision to continue production of cereals, a reversal of its policy announced a few jnonths ago, of concentrating on livestock.

The basic cause of the policy reversal was bad weather in many climes where the staple cereals of human diet', wheat -and rice, are grown. One cannot allocate blame for that, but there are many who think the sudden change of emphasis might have been better managed. Some farmers think compulsory direction for wheatgrowing and restoration of the £4 an acre subsidy should have been renewed before the. autumn sowing; others declare this should have been a timely order for the spring, or at any time that the £1 cut in the subsidy for the 1945 harvest should be restored for 1946. But the Government will not spend the money. Minister Tom Williams says it would involve payment of £2 more for autumn as well as spring-sown wheat, and would amount to extra payment on at least 2,000,000 acres.

Most farmers ask: “Why not, when we are told the food crisis is as severe as at any time during the war?” This refusal brings up at once the question of the food subsidy, which now amounts to £308,000,000 or a trifle more yearly. This £308,000,000 does not go to the enrichment of the farmers; £158,000,000 of it is paid to enable them to produce food in the prevailing conditions of high cost. The remaining £150,000,000 subsidises imported foodstuffs. These huge figures explain why the Agricultural Wages 'Board are adamant against an increase of the farm workers’ minimum wage, thus keeping them, at £3 10s a week, pegged on the lowest rung of the wages ladder.

Training Scheme This, in turn, supplies one reason why the Government’s scheme to train 100,000 ex-service men and women for the land, announced last June, had drawn by February 28 only 1787 applicants. To give the men the £1 increase their union demanded, plus the higher overtime rates and shorter hours the Wages Board did grant, would cost the farmers £50,000,000 a year. They would, therefore, require an upward revision of prices. No two farms in the country are exactly alike. Their differences arise from climate, type of soil, altitude, natural water supply, transport facilities, distance from markets, position in regard to population, tithe, and, if the tenant is not owner, the character of the landlord. And farmers are far from equal in business ability, knowledge, enterprise,, readiness for hard work, patience, and pluck, apart altogether from the amount ’of capital at their back. No Minister of Agriculture or 'Council for the year of the National Farmers’ Union has yet succeeded in pleasing everybody. The great overshadowing grievance, however, proved over the last 70 years, is that agriculture, which should be the key industry in national health and prosperity, under neglect has steadily declined except in the famine threat of great wars. British agriculture means rural Brit,ain—all or it, not merely the farms and. the villages among which they are scattered. Conditions in small market towns and, in some agricultural counties, even the county towns, follow its fortunes. The community involved is not limited to agricultural landlords, farmers, and their workers. The makers of feeding-stuffs, fertilisers and implements, seed growers, country millers ana merchants, livestock auctioneers, blacksmiths, builders—all are dependent on the prosperity of the farms.

People go out from the towns at holiday time and see the brimming gold of the harvest fields, the fruited orchards, flocks and herds, freighted food lorries, and think farming must be a very profitable occupation. They know nothing of production costs—how the farmer has had to pay more and more in succeeding years for everything he must buy, including his labour; how heavy taxation has prevented the farmer from backing his business with a little capital to replace that lost in 20 years of betweenwars de pres si chi. Costs on Small Farms Just under 80 per cent, of English and Welsh farms are of less than 100 acres, and it is the smaller men with their scantier resources and restricted scope who feel the pinch of high costs most. When, in 1922, the Corn Production Act was repealed and everybody knew in advance that a terrible slump was inevitable, farmers were told “to farm economically”—and were left to their own devices. The deplorable state of the land, its drainage and fertility, its buildings and workers’ cottages when the war broke out in 1989 is a byword.- It is still so—except for the land itself, which at immense cost in money, time, and labour was recovered.

Yet the question of labour for. the intensive production programme the world food crisis demands is almost frightening. Our farmers must tackletheir huge tasks with discontented regular workers, an army of conscripts, a dwindling Women’s Land Army nursing a sense of shabby treatment, and as many volunteers as can be mustered at a time when the fine urge of the fighting days has long passed. The farmers themselves hav.e taken one step of great promise. They have called an Agricultural Producers’ Conference of all the Allied Nations, to meet at Westminster in May, to form an International Organisation of Primary Producers. If’ world production and marketing, including exports, can be regularised to the reasonable benefit of both producers and consumers everywhere, we shall have gone some way to clear the mists from the future.

Two things, however, are essential. The evil of gambling in food should be tackled and the principle that home produce should rank first in home markets established.