THE PRODUCER.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 23 June 1928, Page 18

THE PRODUCER.

“There is a very widespread tendency to regard- primary industry as involving production par excellence and secondary industry as of inferior status, or even, in some quarters, to treat secondary industry as parasitical,” says- Mr. C. H. Wiekens, the Gomonwealth Statistician, in an article in the “Economic Record.” X would suggest that this view is probably very largely due to the fact that the primary producer is so closely in contact with the spectacular forces of nature and more than all with that mysterious and- powerful natural life force which 'onverts dead grain into waving fields and replaces existing flocks and herds by new and larger generations. From Iris association with these events, the primary producer is apt to he treated as if he were their creator, instead of being merely the master of. ceremonies. "Where, however, all the activities arc essential to the production of the finished article, which is in reality the objective of all of them and the raison d’etre of any of them, attempts to measure the relative importance of any one of the steps appear futile : hut it may he noted in passing that tlie assessment which would- place the work of the sculptor on a tower plane than that of the man who quarried the block of marble on which ho worked would appear to he wanting in an adequate sense of values. . . Both primary and secondary industry are essential to the appropriate enjoyment of Nature’s bounty, and there can be no degrees in essentialness. The idea, that secondary industry is in any sense parasitic is clearly unsound, hut it- is by no means certain that primary industry may not and has not been, at times- directed wastefully. W-liat is required in those matters, is not recrimination hut a comprehensive review of objectives and- the most economical method of' attaining them, whether by primary or secondary industry.”