Govt blamed for shortage

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33686, 8 November 1974, Page 12

Govt blamed for shortage

The Government should not be “appalled” to learn how close New Zealand had been to the “bread line” at times this year, said Mr A. L. Mulholland, acting Dominion chairman of the agriculture section of Federated Farmers, yesterday.

The Government itself had undermined wheatgrowers’ confidence by holding the basic price of milling-quality wheat and feed wheat at unrealistic levels, said Mr Mulholland.

Farmers, he said, had read with interest the comments of the Under-Secretary of Agriculture (Mr Barclay) on New Zealand’s cereal grain

industry in his address to the annual conference at Auckland of the New Zealand Grain, Seed, and Produce Merchants’ Federation.

He took issue with Mr Barclay on two points. “First, I should remind Mr Barclay that the adequate rewards to producers that he spoke of, to ensure sufficient supplies of bread, have not been permitted by the Government itself. Mr Barclay should not be ‘appalled’ to learn how close to the ‘bread line’ we have been in wheat supply in the last year, when it was the Government, of which he is a member, that undermined the confidence of New Zealand wheatgrowers by keeping prices down at unrealistic levels.

Earlier this year, the basic price for feed wheat had been frozen at $1,625 for a 601 b bushel while the market price

for a 501 b bushel of barley had fluctuated about $1.90 to $2. This unrealistic price for feed wheat, coupled with the earlier comments of the Minister of Agriculture (Mr Moyle) that farmers should concentrate on other more efficient forms of fanning, had not helped to inject much-needed confidence into the wheatgrowing industry, Mr Mulholland said. “These conflicts within the Government on the policy to be adopted towards the wheatgrowing industry should not be allowed to continue,” he said. Farmers had to be given confidence, and what Mr Barclay described as "adequate rewards,” to ensure that New Zealand had sufficient wheat reserves and stocks of feed grains. , If the Government per-

sisted in depressing wheat prices to unrealistic levels, lack of confidence within the industry would continue. “Second, Mr Barclay thought that consideration should be given to the establishment of an over-all organisation aimed at a more orderly system of production and marketing of feed grains, with provision to store a prudent reserve to meet most eventualities,” Mr Mulholland said.,

“I note with interest that he does not mention who will have to pay for such an organisation, or who will have to pay for this prudent carryover of grain,” said Mr Mulholland. “I must ask Mr Barclay whether he sees this cost being borne by the Government, the merchants, the consumers, or (as we suspect) the producers of cereal grain.” #