Farmers fight for a ‘fair go’

Press, 30 July 1986, Page 1

Farmers fight for a ‘fair go’

Wellington reporter Three South Island farmer groups took their fight for a “fair go” under the Government’s economic policies to Parliament yesterday with hard evidence of how the rural crisis is hitting their areas. Parliament’s Select Committee on Primary Production was presented with three petitions calling for policies to bring down interest and exchange rates, and for the Government to make good its pledge that no competent farmer would be forced off the land.

Representing 876 people who signed a petition raised in the Oxford district, Mr Peter Robinson estimated that wheat production in the area would fall about 40 per cent in the coming year because of the cost pres-

sures farmers ' were under. Mr Robinson had figures on wheat-growing costs and returns to show a $ll2 loss per hectare producing 4.25 tonnes, which was the Oxford average yield in 1984-85.

Another Oxford farmer, Mrs Sally Croy, told the committee the district’s two doctors reported a constant flow of stressrelated illnesses and that many marriage breakdowns had occurred. Some families in the district had been identified as living solely on the $2O a week Family Care allowance, Mrs Croy said. Oxford would not survive as a community under the increasing strain it was now under.

The Oxford petition called for Parliament to recognise a need to alleviate rural suffering, and also for the Government to cut its expenditure and

take other steps to jnake exporting competitive.

Mr Robin Leech, also of Oxford, raised the prospect of local markets for domestically grown wheat being taken by Australian imports. The Australian group, Elders, had recently studied storage facilities at Lyttelton for its possible importation of flour, he said. On behalf of 477 people behind a petition in the Ellesmere district, Dr Ralph Lattimore argued that farmers should not be encouraged to move out of cropping because of the present slump in world wheat prices, which would certainly rise again.

Dr Lattimore, a Lincoln College economist, supported the petitioners’ call for a faster removal of import licensing and tariffs by arguing existing protection at the existing

level imposed an excess on farmers’ costs of about $20,000.

An alternative assessment of the cost of $3OOO was insufficient to account for even the higher price of fuel farmers faced because of the barrier against imports of refined petrol, he said.

Another Lincoln lecturer and farmer, Mr John Lay, said many forms of diversification had been tried by Ellesmere farmers, and advocating diversification as a means of overcoming existing problems was simply an “intellectual dream.” Farmers did not have the means to try risky diversification.

Mr Lay said it was hard to assess the financial circumstances of farmers who did not want to talk about them, or admit to failure.

“All we know is that

people are going silent, and this is a dangerous period,” he said. Mr Lay said some of the debt-restructuring attempts so far tried in Ellesmere had been disastrous because some creditors, notably insurance companies, had declined to participate. Mr Brian Scott, awarded Lincoln College’s foundation farmer of the year award in 1984, told the committee he had been told by advisers he faced insolvency next summer.

Although still on a concessional- mortgage - rate from the Rural Bank, Mr Scott had had increases in interest charges on this, another mortgage, and seasonal borrowings amounting to a 39 per cent rise in debt costs per hectare in the last two years.

The Ellesmere group agreed that the exchange

rate should remain floating but argued that the Government must tackle farmer costs by cutting the fiscal deficit, removing import protection, and deregulating the labour market South Otago representatives presented the results of a survey of the finances of 1200 farmers, showing 5 per cent to be in a hopeless situation, 30 per cent to be in a critical one. Seventy per cent face deficits this year. The average farmer in South Otago was likely to have a deficit of $20,000 to $30,000 and a 20 per cent cut in sheep and wool production this year. The representatives, including Otago Federated Farmers’ leaders and local body heads, told the committee the survey was irrefutable evidence their community faced disintegration.