The Evening Star FRIDAY, MAY 4, 1934. THE DAIRYING COMMISSION.

Evening Star, Issue 21711, 4 May 1934, Page 8

The Evening Star FRIDAY, MAY 4, 1934. THE DAIRYING COMMISSION.

Thk Royal Commission on the Dairying Industry is to report by Juno 16. It has thus about six weeks in which to perform a duty the importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. Under the circumstances into which the industry has drifted—production at a loss, accompanied by a heavy increase in production, which merely tends to widen the gap between expenditure and income—it might bo expected that the commission would be seriously embarrassed by a plethora of evidence tendered by shoals of witnesses. Time, however, is a most valuable consideration. The export season is drawing to a close, but it would be advantageous for members of Cabinet and of Parliament to have the commission’s recommendations in their hands before Parliament meets, so that some alleviation may be granted to those engaged in the industry by the time the new season opens—which in the far north is in August—and they may enter on it with some reasonable hope of not getting further into the mire, presuming they do not in the meantime resolve to be quit,of a business which may not reach the level of even subsistence farming. If the desirable expedition is to be achieved such requests as that from Taranaki for the commission to visit that district and accumulate evidence will have to be turned down. There is a good deal to be said for the view expressed by Mr M’lntosh at yesterday’s meeting of the Dominion Executive of the Farmers' Union. He advocated that the commission should not take any evidence at all except that of experts on technical matters concerning which the commission might need enlightenment. As for anything else, the essential facts have already been .collated from a variety of sources, and the Farmers’ Union is already taking steps for the presentation of the dairy producers’ case to the commission. There is one matter on which it would be inadvisable for the commission to trench. At the Farmers’ Union meeting Mr Mellsop urged that evidence should be tendered to the commission concerning the feeling of a very large section of the British public on the subject of quotas. It would be merely hearsay • evidence, and this whole question should be left to he negotiated between the British and the New Zealand Governments. Quotas arc the declared policy of the British Minister of Agriculture, and it would be injudicious for New Zealand to presume any longer to try and dictate to our principal customer on a domestic concern of her own. Britain at present has a difficult enough task in reconciling a number of conflicting interests. She' wishes to promote her own agriculture; she. wishes to enlarge her exports to her own dominions; and she wishes to regain her former standing in foreign markets. It is less than a year since the Anglo-Danish trade agreement became operative. The Board of Trade figures only cover the nine months ended March 31, 1934. These show that in that period Britain bought from Denmark goods (almost exclusively bacon an*l dairy produce) worth nearly £26,000,000, 'while Denmark bought nearly £10,000,000 worth of goods from Britain. That is one-way trade. And so have New Zealand’s business transactions with Britain for years past (apart from interest payments or because of them) been oneway trade. There are other countries, such as the Argentine or Russia, whose sales to Britain have been far in excess of their purchases from her, with whom Britain is evidently anxious to improve the volume of her visible exports. -It is becoming yearly more difficult. And one reason is that Britain’s invisible exports are too high, because of the streams of goods that must pour into her ports to pay her oversea investors. One sympathises with England in her efforts to preserve the peace of the world so that the accepted order of things may continue—i.e., so that chiefly by reason of her investors regularly receiving their interest her trade balance may bo on the right side. The trend of world trade seems to be showing that this is not practicable. One cannot have one’s cake and eat it, too. Perhaps the crisis in the New Zealand dairying industry will help to drive this lesson home in our selling market.