The Evening Star. MONDAY, MARCH 1, 1926. DAIRY CONTROL BOARD.

Evening Star, Issue 19186, 1 March 1926, Page 6

The Evening Star. MONDAY, MARCH 1, 1926. DAIRY CONTROL BOARD.

The deputation representative of southern dairying interests which waited on tho Prime Minister and the Minister of Agriculture on Saturday serves as a reminder that as from August 1 the Dairy Control Board will exercise its full powers of absolute control. It is unnecessary recall how great has been tho division of opinion among dairymen throughout tho piece on this handing over of their means of livelihood to an autocratic body, or to review the devious means by which tho promoters of tho scheme have obtained their ends. The history of the business has been indeed involved. Suffice it to say that this latest revival of the subject deals with tho method of election of the Control Board. In view of the arbitrary powers with which Iho board has been armed, it is extremely vital to the dairy producers that members of the board should represent them truly and accurst'-'-- Tho more direct tho form of election, the better chance there is of this. Yet it appears as though direct representation is something which they are compelled to struggle for against odds. Thoso who have engineered the evolution of the board from its seemingly innocuous inception some years ago to tho very different form in which it now straddles the industry are in turn enamored of any system except that by which a direct vote would be recorded by the producer himself. There have been put forward tho “council” and the “college ” systems, and now the “ tonnage export ” basis, by which not the man on the land but the directors of the factories supplied would exercise tho vote for the Control Board election. It should by now ho quite plain that the dairy farmer prizes his own direct vote, and that the only change in tho system of election he would favor is that by which ho would come into yet closer touch with his representative—i.e., by instituting the ward system in both islands. Both tho Ministers who received tho deputation expressed sympathy with tho request, and it remains to ho seen how active that sympathy will be when tho matter comes on for decision.

A commercial contemporary published in Christchurch has just described the establishment of the Dairy Control Board and its final development as likely to go down in history as “ one of the greatest political-commercial scandals of the day.” This paper declares that the Meat Control Board has failed ignoxniniously in the main object for which it was set up—the stabilisation of prices—and asks of what use it is if it is powerless to remedy the present exceptionally bad position of the frozen meat trade. As to the dairying industry, the same authority thus describes the recent operations of the Dairy Control Board: —“During the past six weeks very heavy supplies of butter reached the terminal market from New Zealand and Australia. All this butter was not allowed to roach the market. It was regulated; that is to say, a certain percentage of the supplies was withheld from sale, and the market price was thus artificially .raised, and, of course, there was a check to consumption. This now system, which appears to have been inaugurated by the New Zealand Control Board, with tho assistance and support of tho Australian Board, has raised the antagonism of the wholesale distributors, and this antagonism is sure to have a bad effect on Now Zealand.” “Mushroom economists” is the terra applied to those who have been stirring up in the farming community tho belief that their salvation lies in the stabilisation of prices. In the first place, it is doubtful if stabilisation is practicable, and in the second place it has to be proved whether, being achieved, it is beneficial. The demand for stabilisation resulted from abnormal war-time conditions, when supplies wore short of widening demand and prices and profits soared. Now it is being attempted to maintain those conditions and make use of artificial means to circumvent the law of supply and demand. It is the common experience in business that any temporary rise engineered by artificial means is almost invariably followed by a slump. In answer to this it is, of course, claimed that under Control the rise would not be temporary, but permanent. On this result the efficacy of the principle of Control will be judged later. In tho meantime it is permissible to* point out that Control aims at destroying a factor of high economic value, for stabilisation would oust flexibility of prices, and no less an economist than Mr Hartley Withers has declared that this flexibility of phices has been an indication to producers and traders as to what commodities are plentiful and what are scarce, so that capital and labor may he set to work to supply those things which aro shown by rising prices to be wanted. Is tho old idea of “ peace and plenty ” representing the sumnium bonum to bo eradicated from the mind of tho producer. Are both he and the consumer to ho educated into believing that the world will be a much happier place if it is kept in chronic deliberate under§upp]y pf the neceggariea pf life?.