Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, FRIDAY, SEPT. 27, 1929. RURAL INDUSTRY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17067, 27 September 1929, Page 6

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, FRIDAY, SEPT. 27, 1929. RURAL INDUSTRY

The plight of rural industry has become a perennial topic in most countries, and it is particularly so in England, where schemes' for |ho restoration of agriculture are continually under survey. The importance of farming to the nation was realised at the time of the Great War, when England's supplies of foodstuffs were being rapidly cut down by the ruthless submarine campaign. In those arduous days the farmer rose to the occasion, and his efforts, under control and with liberal assistance, not only assured adequate sustenance for the British population, but it freed a tremendous tonnage of shipping and enabled the vessels to be employed in necessary war transport. Since .the war agriculture has declined. England’s traditional policy of froctrnde and the strong, public antipathy to the taxation of foodstuffs have resulted in overseas shipments of such volume that the production from the farms of the United Kingdom fails to find lucrative markets, with a consequence that more and more land once under tillage is going back to grstss. An agricultural correspondent who recently made a tour of 6000 miles in the C-d Country writes .to the Daily Express: “From the south to the Scottish border, from the North Sea to the A' ten tie, I have watched, with a sinkini at heart, the swift decay of our first national industry, the wanton, thoughtless destruction of our greatest national asset. Grass and still more grass, with the.ploughs rusting in outhouses and the corn area shrinking until it is less by far then it was be*

fore the war, diminishing employment, turning prosperity, only here and there' a man with character, vision and courage who has risen superior to mischance—these are what one meets along the road.’’ The farmer, it is said by the writer, states that no purpose'can' be served by increased production because themarket won’t buy at a price that- will enable him to live. He points to his corn that, yields little or no profit, his beef and mutton raised to enrich the middleman, his milk that the combines charge almost as much .to distribute as they pay him for production. Talk to him about national organisation, and lie breaks out in passionate "protest against “hordes of .officials, j’ oven though he is compelled to confess that during .the war years when farming was controlled he made money. Agriculture is down and out, he says, and, as though to make himself a true prophet, puls more coralaad to grass or allows it to seed itself into worthless pasture that can neither be mown nor grazed to advantage. imports pour in from overseas, and £350,000,(100 is spent, on foodstuffs from far-off lands, making economists realise that this great food bill can only be met by the interest on foreign investments and profits on shipping. Instances are given of the changes that have come over the face of rural England. In Buckinghamshire iii one little village where once there were between 90 and 100 agricultural laborers, to-day there are six; in an East Anglian parish the arable acreage has shrunk from 1500 acres to 150 and many cottages have disappeared. There arc parts of the country'to-day where farms are to be had rent free by those who have the money and the courage to bring the .land back into good heart, and to pay the outgoings. “The arable area, shrinking for nearly ten years.” says the Express, ‘‘lias fallen to-dav below the pre-war tig lire. Labor is drifting to the towns to swell the ranks of the unemployed, cottage property is decaying, great estates are on the market, and withal, the public is no better off. If the public imagination could be stirred as the German submarines stirred it, but in less repellent and alarming fashion, the whole face of England could be changed in a few years, and the enormous burden of food imports reduced to dimensions that need give our statesmen .no concern. Other countries show the way. Germany ha's 20 per cent, of her farming area down to grass, France 30 per cent., England nearly 65 per cent. France employs twenty men out of every hundred other population on the work of feeding the rest, Germany seventeen, England three. One hundred acres of grassland will grow food equivalents for twenty- people, one hundred acres of ploughland will support eighty. There are' not half a dozen agricultural countries that are yielding their quota to the maintenance of England.” The paper proceeds'to expound a scheme for the restoration'of rural industry. Briefly the plan involves flic division of the country into national production centres of 50,000 acres, each centre being organised in five 10,000-aerc sections. It, involves the issue of a national food production Joan of £50,000,000, of which one half would be earmarked for rural housing and the other half for equipping the centres with bungalows, hutments, factories, and recreation halls, and for providing the necessary tractors, drills, rollers, carts and so on. Finally, it involves a national food -board, on which the Government, the.county councils, and technologists would be represented, to control the centres. This is the administrative and financial framework of the scheme. The grading of the live stock; certificates for wheat of milling quality which would bring the producer a guaranteed price based on costs; central clearing houses, and a complete overhauling of the systems of rural transport and delivery—these and many other much-needed supports and reforms fall' naturally into .their places as part of the plan. Its objective is to bring back five million acres of grass to the plough, to relieve unemployment, and so stimulate production and organise marketing in every branch of, agriculture that a million pounds a day can be saved to the country. Such a policy, of course, is worth striving for, but whether any Government will be found in England bold enough to grapple with the problem and carry the proposals to the logical conclusion of free trade for Empire products, with a tariff on foreign importations, is another matter.