A DOLEFUL PROSPECT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 9 October 1925, Page 7

A DOLEFUL PROSPECT.

DECLINE OF AGIUCTLTTHI-;. LAND GOING DEUEL ICO’. (By Lovat Kraser.) The population' of England and Wales has almost doubled in the last seventy years. The v southern half of Great, Britain contained 20,000,000 people in 1861, and now has nearly 39,000,000. Greater London has increased by a. million in. the last two decades.While population has been multiplying agriculture has been declining for fifty years. We have lost nearly four million, acres of plough land in the last half century. In the last ten years we have lost a million acres of pasture land. We have over a million fewer people employed in agriculture than we had in 1861. fu the bust three years over 60.000 people have left the land.

Whither are we drifting? We are lotting in the jungle.

1 do not like subsidies at all. but, if f had to give a subsidy 1 would prefer to give it to agriculture and to our fisheries: Our seas .-.still teem with food and their produce might be greatly increased, but we are consuming 80 per cent less fish than we did ten years ago, because onr. Ministers know nothing and care nothing about our sea fisheries, and are not interested in food problems. We have 6000 fewer fishermen than wo had when war began and nothing is being done (except by the late Lord Leverhu lime’s successors at Wembley) to popularise a fish diet.

T do not believe in big farms for this country, but I believe much could be done to increase our food supply, by an. expansion of moderate-sized holdings on. a co-operative basis. Emigration alone will not solve our population difficulties. The Australian scheme, good though it is, proposes to , eitle fewer than 50,000 immigrants a year. Our population increases by 50.000 every ten weeks. And as for our manufacturing industries, iieie is what we are “up against.” Sir Philip Lawson says of Germany: “Fifty-eight hours per week are being worked in many of the industries; sixty in Dusseldorf; a spell of sixty-eight is not' exceptional. Thirty-five shillings a week is ait accepted rate of wage; two pounds* considered high. A tax of ten per cent is deducted before payment from all wages.” Whatever Mr Baldwin may or may not have blurted out about wages going down, that is the kind of competition wo have to face. I We shall not lessen our costs of production or find the money for our food by a policy of doles all round. Only more work for less money and a wholesale reduction of nation,al expenditure will save us from ultimate starvation. We are dole-macl. and a disastrous retribution is bound to overtake us. At the time old-age pensions were introduced we were-told that the workhouses would disappear, but whereas the Poor Daw cost us £15,000,000 when pensions began, it now costs us £40.000,000. The new Pensions Bill will admittedly involve u>s in an ultimate capital expenditure of £740,000.000. Shall we ever be able to meet it? In this present session the Government has further embarked upon a cruiser programme which -will eventually cost £58,000,000. They have decided to persist in the Singapore dock scheme, which will probably cost £20,000,000 by the time it is finished, and may drag us into a fatal war. And now they have .simultaneously abdicated their authority and made promises to King Coal which may cost another €20,000,000. A melancholy record'for a single session ! The Federation of British Industries, in an able pamphlet on the causes of

(.lie stagnation of British trade, to which few have paid attention. estimate that the loss of interest on the foreign investments we sacrificed during the war, and the loss of our investing power represented by our debt ,payments to the United States amount to .£110,000,000 annually at 19V4 values. Yet the Government goes gaily on distributing largesse wholesale. Our Ministers are so busy handing out doles all round that they do not estop to think what will happen when we cannot ipav for the food we buy overseas. That able American statesman, Mr. Hoover, warned ti.s alter the armistice that if we could not pay for our meat and wheat overseas producers would have to let us starve. In the ney,t twelve months we shall probably have to import- 2o.o00.000! quarters of wheat (a quarter is 4801 b). With wheat at about oos a quarter we shall have to find over £60,000.000 in money or goods for our imported bread alone. No other nation has isirch til immense food bill abroad. We depend

ii other lands foi foili-fii tils of our bread, and about half our meat. Dr. Addison, lia.s stated recently that fivesixths of the meat consumed in London is foreign. A.ga in I. ask : H iow shall we find the money for four-fifths of our bread, half our meat, ®ix-tenth« of our butter and cheese and one-fourth of our eggs, all 1.1 ought from abroad, if the Government and a rapacious bureaucracy continue to commandeer and to fling broadcast a great proportion of our national income ?