PRODUCE MARKET.

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 64, 11 February 1930, Page 2

PRODUCE MARKET.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —The cable, under the above heading, from Canberra, the capital of the Commonwealth of Australia, which appeared in your issue of Saturday last, stating that Australia s Trade Commissioner was negotiating with the British Government for the sale of farm produce direct to the Chancellor of the British Exchequer is good news for the Australian farmer. New Zealand farmers should join in this movement to escape the robbery they are now experiencing at the hands of the combines which are now plundering the producers of this country. The wool, meat, butter and cheese prices paid this year are so far below the figures that consumers pay in the Homeland that it is high time steps were taken to stop this exploitation of Dominion producers. The one and only way to do this is by selling such goods to the Home Government for resale minus middlemen’s extortionate profits. In this way stable prices will be regularly obtainable by the primary producer at the highest level of value the Home consumer can afford to pay. This system of marketing produce would stabilise the value of land and of labour, cost of production, enabling all men on the land to operate with safety. It will . stop the booming and slumping of values in farm lands, in live stock and in perishable products. Stability is what every genuine farmer wants. It is only the speculators who gamble in land and in the produce of land who like slumps in order to buy in at low valuations and then booms in order to sell only at high figures. New Zealand has surely had enough of these sickening up and down movements and should welcome a period of calm even price marketing with no fluctuations which ruin thousands and enrich only a few. No notice must be taken of those who will condemn this level pricing of products as Socialism bent upon restricting the operations of private enterprise. State enterprise is required to prevent slumps and booms which cannot be avoided under existing marketing conditions and if Government inteivention in this direction is Socialism then the sooner we get it the better. The high rates of interest which banks now levy upon primary producers to finance the marketing of farm products is a matter that the State should take up seeing that the farmers of this country have not sufficient sense to provide themselves with agricultural banks of issue of their own. When the Home buyer is the Government of Great Britain payments will be so absolutely assured that farm produce will be as good a security for credits as gold and the holders of such good security should never be asked to pay more than five per cent for advances required.—l am, etc., F. T. MOON, Palmerston North, February 10, 1930.