Town-farm gap deplored

Press, 21 August 1979, Page 3

Town-farm gap deplored

The information gap between town and country was deplored by the Under-Secretary for Agriculture (Mr Talbot) yesterday. It was a “shocking condemnation” of a country whose economic lifeblood depended on the efforts of rural New Zealanders, he said when he opened the twenty-fifth anniversary convention of the Institute of Agricultural Science at Lincoln College.

Nowhere on the programme for the convention, except possibly for a small section on agricultural education, was time set down for discussing the topic. Mr Talbot said that people in the agricultural sector made life much harder for themselves by not trying harder to ’nform all New Zealanders of their role in society. “To have reached the stage where the largest

newspaper in New Zealand devotes only one page a week to agricultural matters is a sad commentary on the importance we attach to agricultural communication,” he said. Mr Talbot also appealed to leaders and decisionmakers in agriculture to put behind them the pessimism and negative attitudes of the past and start thinking and speaking positively and constructively.