VOICES FROM THE FARMS

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 81, 3 October 1921, Page 6

VOICES FROM THE FARMS

The American farmer's contribution to the discussion on the economic salvation of the United States takes the form of an argument that the best. way to help American industry is to help the American farmer. It is very pleasing to discover that to help one's country it is necessary to help one's self. Nevertheless, there is a. good deal in what the American farmer says. In order to keep up the pace of its war and post-war prosperity, United States manufacturing industry will either have to sell abroad or sell at home. Its chance of selling abroad is limited by the fact that a period of unprecedented boom has raised its producing costs, and therefore the price of its manufactured goods; that that price is made still more difficult to the European consumer by unfavour*' able exchange and by his general impoverishment. and reduction of purchasing power; that Europe's incapacity to pay is intensified by an American tariff excluding Europe's goods—about the only thing that Europe can offer in payment for American goods. Handicapped thus in selling abroad, American secondary industries must look for a market in American primary industries ; whereupon the American farmer rises to remark that he has no intention of continuing to pay high prices and freights when the prices he receives have been severely deflated. In a protectionist country like the United States, unless agriculture and manufacture can strike a mutually satisfactory bargain, things go ill with both. In New Zealand, the prices of the primary commodities on which we rely to pay war pensions are fixed in a world-market by world-competition.