BRITISH AGRICULTURE

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LX, Issue 17, 3 March 1939, Page 4

BRITISH AGRICULTURE

Talking on the future of farming in Britain, Mr A. G. Street, the novelist, said in a recent broadcast:—"l am a tenant farmer who is worried about the condition of the land, who wishes to see a much better farmed countryside than the one which 'shames this great nation today. Farming's chief handicap is its special Ministry. For years now the Ministry of Agriculture has been used as a political instrument to bamboozle farmers that they are getting something special and. at the same time, to deny them equal political treatment with other industries. Farming is a great industry, the fourth largest in Britain, both in the value of its annual output and in the number of people which it employs. It has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being treated in the same way as other industries of comparable size. The first thing to do, then, is to abolish the Ministry of Agriculture and to put farming under the jurisdiction of the Board of Trade. This would stop the continuous sacrifice of the countryside on the altar of town interests. The next thing is to decide the purpose of our agricultural policy. It should be to help neither farmers, labourers, nor consumers, but to help and serve faithfully the one thing concerned which can't speak for itself—the land of our own country. Here, and all over the world, can ue seen the lamentable results of robbing land for the immediate good of people, leaving a derelict countryside. Farm for the benefit of the people, and vthe land is soon ruined and the people suffer. Farm for the benefit of the land and the people either on it or round about it are all right."