THE WHEAT DUTIES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21296, 24 September 1932, Page 14

THE WHEAT DUTIES

Sir, —"Fair Play" places the agitation against the wheat duties at the door of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce. I place it on the fertile brains of the members whom he accuses of having no sympathy with "the man on the land." What nonsense! By asking for a commission to consider the present duties they are trying to find out it the Government is justified in forcing men on the land —dairy farmers and others—to pay what they consider an unfair tax on them, and want a square deal for all who pay the tax in such abnormal times of distress and unemployment. I am quite satisfied that no poultry farmers can make a profit on the ruling price of eggs and the present price of fowlwheat. Is it fair play to protect one section of men on the land and bankrupt the other section ? I repeat that we want a square deal for all and no favour. Pensioner* Sir, —In the matter of duties on wheat and flour this country might well take a lesson from Denmark, which has long given up the protection of wheat, and which, in consequence, has developed agricultural industries unsurpassed elsewhere. Denmark is a very small country, not much larger than Canterbury, but not endowed by nature with anything like Canterbury's or Auckland's resources in the way of soil or climate. Her livestock has to be housed and hand-fed during a great pavt of the year. Her population is about double that of New Zealand, and she exports a weekly average of £1,500.000 of farm products. She has long given up protective duties on wheat or other_ grain. She imports wheat in great quantities, the cheaper the better, and thanks to this cheap supply of the raw material for her livestock industries, and to the skill, energy and intelligence of her people, she lias made

her farming the envy and admiration of the world. And she still grows wheat on such of her land as is suited for wlieat growing; in fact, she grows some of the best wheat crops in Europe. There is not a shadow of a doubt that if New Zealand did awav with the wheat duties and adopted "Danish methods, by the proper application of science to our farming, by the greater use of intelligent .co-operatipn and intensive cultivation, we could build up, as Denmark has done, industries for the production of pork and bacon, eggs and poultry, etc., that would absorb in Canterbury alone many times the number of all those unemployed in New Zealand to-day. And we could still go on growing wheat on suitable land. To say that wlieat cannot be grown here unless subsidised is sheer nonsense. Our average yield per acre

is a high one. It is not the cost of seed, labour and manure that makes wheat growing unprofitable, but the cost incurred by the inflation of land values. One of your correspondents recently stated that wheat' is more heavily taxed in all the countries of Europe than it is here. This is true neither of Denmark nor of Holland, and in both these countries, as in England, food is plentiful and cheap and the standard of living twice as high as in these European countries _ where wheat is taxed highly and where, in spite of protection, agriculture is most of all depressed. Wheat and flour duties are not in the interests of the farmers of this or of any country. They press heavily on the poultry farmer, the" pig farmer and the fattener of stock. They benefit the landowner only, enabling him to extract more rent from the land vj.>er. In the case of the wheat grower who farms his own land it is in his capacity of landowner that he is benefited by the duties, not in his capacity as farmer. J. E. Stevens.