BRITISH AGRICULTURE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21561, 4 August 1933, Page 13

BRITISH AGRICULTURE

Sir, —-The difficulties that confront British agriculture, and which have been the subject matter of several recent letters to the Herald have not sprung up like a mushroom. As long ago as 1881 the founder of the National Agriculture Labourers' Union said that "we have the agriculturalists in such a position as cannot be found in any nation under the sun, 1 believe, with something like 25 per cent of the occupiers of tbo land turning bankrupt or on the brink of bankruptcy." When giving evidence before a Royal Commission in December of the same year, Joseph Arch stated in reply to the Duke of Richmond, who was president, that he "thought the reason of the present depressed state of agriculture arose from three causes, i.e., not sufficient labour employed, rents too high, and not enough money put in the land." Mr. Arch strongly advocated before the commissioners, among other things, an Act of Parliament fixing the scale of rents and the abolition of entail and primogeniture, he being of the opinion, that the latter undoubtedly help enormously to starve the land. At the last Annual General Court of Proprietors of the Royal Bank of Scotland the Governor, the Duke.of Buccleuch, said: "Our great industry in Scotland —farming—continues in a depressed condition, and there is no department of our economic life where alleviation is more urgently called for." One is infclined to think that very little progress with regard to putting agriculture on a satisfactory profit-earning basis has been made in the United Kingdom during the last fifty years. T.H.