Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, MONDAY, APRIL 21, 1930. DOMINION SETTLEMENT

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17239, 21 April 1930, Page 6

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING GISBORNE, MONDAY, APRIL 21, 1930. DOMINION SETTLEMENT

The main factors influencing the views of many politicians regarding migration within the Empire as a step towards the Jinal cure for unemployment can be very simply set down. From the point of view of some British politicians, in fact, it is all a ridiculously simple matter from beginning to end. All that is needed is to encourage emigration to the overseas Dominions and further to encourage the emigrants to take up work on the land. This will automatically reduce the numbers of the unemployed at Home and at the same time develop the resources of the empire in places where, it is understood, the land is crying out for laborers. It is extraordinarily obvious, on the face of it, to many of these politicians, and they cannot see why their ideas should not be put into immediate operation. It may be, of course, that they have been puzzled oil occasion by the failure of one oi’ two such schemes as have been experimented with along such lines, but some politicians are born optimists. They continue to argue that in the Dominions there are large stretches of available and suitable country —the development of which is being retarded because no settlers have settled on them, and that the natural thing is to transfer the people without work to the work without peoplo in these fair domains. Even such an eminent politician as Dr. Iladen Guest, in a recent article, is quoted as having said: "An expanding market in tire Dominions created by the work of settlers upon, the unused natural resources of these countries, an expanding market in the Colonies, an expanding market in India, these are the new factors which can break the vicious circle of low wages, unemployment, low purchasing power and low wages again in this country, and enable the process of industrial reorganisation to be carried out on the basis of high wages and high standards instead of on the basis of insufficiency. ’ ’ Quite plausible, all that. Yet it leaves an uneasy' feeling in the mind, and one's reasoning faculties scent a fallacy somewhere. No one will deny that the need of the world, so far as the world-wide problem of unemployment is concerned, is for larger markets. The potentialities of supply are far greater than those of demand, in other words; and that is just, the difficulty. The plight of agriculture itself must he taken into consideration. It is all very well to proceed upon the unexamined presupposition that agricultural products, have an unlimited demand; but such, in point of fact, is not the case. The products of agriculture are in the same category as any other kind. Demand does not come up to possible supply. There is no lack, and there has not been, of possible settlers in undeveloped tracts of the Empire, but as things are there is a lack of demand for the resulting products. Economics must not bo regarded as an exact science* in the sense that it has rigid laws which can be universally applied. There is one law which says that supply will increase demand, or create it if it does not already exLst. Before men learned to make motor-cars or aeroplanes there was naturally no demand for them; but when they were supplied, appetite grew by what it fed on, and demand was created. But that law would seem to apply rather to new creations of industry rather than old, established productions such as the primary productions of agriculture. Consumption here is definite consumption, eonsuffiption of that which is necessary for bare existence. The demand for the products of the land cannot be put into the same category as that for many of the products of industry. Industrially speaking, a reduction of demand results in low wages and in unemployment, but agriculturally speaking, the result is low prices. Generally speaking, when land is being worked at all, there is very little unemployment. The work is there all the time. Good times and bad times, to the man who works on the land, lmve little to do with scarcity of work and almost everything to do with the prices received for the work that lias been expended, '[’hose are elementary facts; so elementary that they are often overlooked by the high-brou economists who are busy working out intricate theories of their own. Because agriculture as a rule has very little unemployment and because there are undoubtedly still largo areas of land to be cultivated, it is reckoned that agriculture in different parts of the Empire can absorb the surplus unemployed population, It is not so, and the fact that

it is not so constitutes one of the grayest and most important elements in the question of migration within the Empire, indeed, quite a case can be made out for the view that in many of the Dominions there are far too many already engaged in agriculture for the well-being of the industry as a whole. Particularly .since the war, agricultural production lias been constantly checked by low prices, or in other words the tendency to overproduction has kept prices down to a consistently low level. This may be said to be true not only of one or two kinds of farm produce, but of all kinds. But one illustration may be given in the case of wheat. It is held that from 1921 to 1924 the world market was over-supplied with this staple commodity, with the result that many farmers in Canada, Australia and elsewhere were not only thrown on their beam ends but put out of business because of the drop in prices. It happened in 1924 that there was a shortage in the world crop, so that prices showed a distinct rise, which in turn gave rise to the same old vicious circle For with the rise of prices production was encouraged, and with the increase in production prices fell again, until in 1928 ruinously low levels were again reached. Last season, no one can say what conditions would have been like but for the partial failure of the Canadian crop and the poor production in Australia and the Argentine. Wheat, as has been said, is taken here as an illustration, but the market for pork, beef, dairy produce, eggs, etc., is in practically the same precarious position, so that what has been said of wheat may he taken as applying to these other products. The conclusion ,would therefore seem .to be that it is no solution of present difficulties merely to transfer settlers who happen to be unemployed in Britain, to lands which are already in most cases bearing their own burden of surplus labor.