‘Farming Targets Not Being Realised’

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30895, 30 October 1965, Page 3

‘Farming Targets Not Being Realised’

(New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, Oct. 29. Targets set by the Agricultural Production Conference were not being realised, said Professor K. B. Cumberland, professor of geography at the University of Auckland, today. He was replying to a statement by the Minister of Agriculture (Mr Taiboys), upholding farming policy and questioning previous comments by Professor Cumberland and that the conference had been allowed to fade to a distant, depressive and ineffectual whisper.

“It is easy for anyone to select isolated statistics that tend to suggest agricultural production is rising or promises to show a 'probable' rise at some future date,” said Professor Cumberland. “It is easier still for the Minister.” But, he added. New Zealand was into the third production season of the 10-year target period and this season should be almost one third of the way to having 111 million ewe equivalents by 1972-73.

“As it is, we shall, in fact, be less than a tenth of the way this season to our minimum essential objectives,” Dr. Cumberland said. “The Director of Agriculture himself admits that production is ‘seriously lagging.’ “The Minister has said that the real catalyst to securing expanded farm output is some incentive related directly to

increased livestock carried, and he admits that it has not been possible to devise such an incentive. Capital Topdressing “Meanwhile the considerable tax benefits of capital topdressing have been replaced by a paltry transport subsidy, applying only to back-country-farmers and so small that it has already been swallowed up by the rising costs of fertiliser and of aerial spreading. “And the Government is actually encourging fanners to freeze their surplus income —their one ready source of development capital—in the income equalisation scheme." The Minister was ignoring the real point—that the bal-ance-of-payments problem was reaching crisis proportions, said Dr. Cumberland.

“The one possibility of remedying it is to expand massively our farm output and exports," he said. “It is not only the Minister and the Government that show little evidence of appreciating this." Fanners’ organisations, concerned with everybody else's business but their own, and those producer boards concerned with promotion and marketing and prices to the exclusion of production, would also seem not to appreciate the seriousness of the situation. “What is worse, when the Minister suggests that all in the fanners’ garden is lovely and that continuation of ‘steady does it’ will suffice, then the country as a whole has no awareness of the critical state of the national economy," said Professer Cumberland.