WHEAT & FLOUR COSTS

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 19, 22 July 1932, Page 6

WHEAT & FLOUR COSTS

(To the Editor.)

Sir,- Your excellent leader of yesterday on Tariff Costs is well timed. It is a disgrace to this democratic country that it permits the food of the people to be made artificially dear in the supposed interest of a special group. When I arrived in Wellington from England, less than cix, months ago I found the price of . bread more than double what it was in England at that time, and that of cakes^ biscuits, etc., similarly increased.

There is no possible justification for the taxation of wheat or flour ia this or any country. Why should one set of farmers be subsidised? If wheat,; why not also oats, fat lambs, mutton, wool, cheese, turnips, poultry, eggs, honey, fruit, etc., etc.? It may be replied that the State does, in one way or another, assM others besides wheat producers. Then the'general community is to that extent robbed. '-■. A tax on wheat, flour, and the by-pro-ducts of wheat penalises'the producer of eggs and poultry and the fattener'of stock kills the pork and bacon industry, increases the costs of "the, biscuit and cake manufacturer and the baker, and cuts .deeply into the weekly allowance of every housed wife in the Dominion. ,' ' } New Zealand should' take a lesson from Denmark in this matter. little country, which is about .the size of Canterbury, but not endowed by Nature with anything like Canterbury's agricultural resources or climate, has long given up the protection of* wheat. She imports great quantities of wheat at the,lowest pbssible price, the cheaper the better, and thanks to this cheap supply of the raw material for her live stock industries and to the skill, energy, and intelligence of her people, she has made her farming industry the envy and admiration-of the world, ■ producingnthc finest butter, cheese, pork, bacon, eggs, and poultry. And she still grows' wheat on such of her land as is suited for wheat production, in fact she grows some of the best wheat crops in Europe. There is not a shadow of a doubt that if New Zealand did away with the wheat duties, and adopted Danish methods, by the proper application of science to oiir farming, by the 'greater use of intelligent co-opera-tion and intensive cultivation, we could build up industries for tho production of pork aud bacon, eggs and poultry, etc., that would absorb in Canterbury alone many times the number o£ all those unem-

ployed in New Zealand to-day. And wo could still go ou growing wheat on suitable land.

It is our system of -spoon-feeding special industries, many of which are parasitic in their nature, that tends to herd our people into towns and to neglect the development of the natural resources ot the country. The wheat duties are not in the interests of the farmers of this conntry. They press heavily on the pig farmer, the poultry farmer, and the fattener of stock. All they do for the wheat farmer is to inflate the value of land in which wheat might be grown. They benefit the laudowJier only, enabling him to extract more rent from the land user. In the case of the wheat farmer who farms his own land, it is only in his capacity as landowner that he is benefited by the duties/.not. m his capacity as farmer or land user. We are told that without a subsidy wheat can only be grown here at a loss. With land producing 40 to SO bushels an acre this is sheer nonsense. It is not the cost of seed, labour, and manure "that makes wheat growing unprofitable, but the cost incurred by the inflation of; laud values. Here again we might study Denmark with advantage. There the farmers are intelligent enough to recognise the value to them of the land tax, which, enforced there for over 200 years, has kept down the selling value of laud,'made laud more accessible for those'who wish to use it, and checked greatly land speculation, the greatest curse New Zealand, has eyer known.—l am, etc.,, ; J. E.. STEVENS. Nelson, 21st. July. ■'■■■'•