BURN ALL WAR DEBTS

Taranaki Daily News, 21 September 1931, Page 15

BURN ALL WAR DEBTS

STOCK AGENT’S ADVICE. WAY OUT OF FINANCIAL MIRE. “What the whole world should do is to constitute a holiday for all the people aud simultaneously in every centre have a bonfire and burn the war debts, each country acknowledge that it is bankrupt, get its clearance and start afresh. That is the only hope for the farmers.” So declared a well-known Canterbury stock and station ageut who is in close touch with the position of tho farmers. He said, reports the - Christchurch Times, that the practice of raising loans to pay the interest and principal of previous debts was only getting the country further into the financial mire. He gave instances where more than twice the amount of the equity previously* held by farmers in their lands had been swallowed up by the fall in primary produce, and stated that the creditor nations of the world must wipe off a considerable proportion of their principal in the same way as. farm mortgagees had to write down their capital. The action of the then Government in allowing prospective soldier settlers to buy the land themselves, and afterwards to obtain Government sanction for their purchases, was given by tho speaker as one of the main reasons for tho land boom in the years 1919 and 1920. Farmers who had bought at that time were now in the most desperate straits owing to having to find interest on value that was not now there. He stated that if the Reform Government had bargained for the land itself and then parcelled it out to the soldier settlers there would not have been a boom with such disastrous consequences when prices for produce fell. Land at that time went up from 25 to 100 per cent., and in a good »many cases farmers who had bought previously at ordinary levels sold out and purchased other properties at a high price. Those farmers sometimes left up to three mortgages on their former holding, and when prices fell they found themselves with two properties on their bauds, and unable to finance both. In the boom times farmers were receiving from 30s to £2 a head, for fat lambs, from 2s 6d to 3s per lb for wool, 2s Sd for butter-fat and 7s a bushel for wheat. Last season the price of fat lambs was about 12s a head, and for wool 6d per lb or under was all that could be secured, mainly because the war debts had crippled the purchasing power of overseas countries other than the United States. "There is such a thing as over-pro-, duction,” stated the stock agent. The* whole world seems to have more food and less money. This lack of money in other countries has forced down the prices of primary produce. Something will have to be done for the farmers, though I have no sympathy with a mortgagee who sold his land in the boom period and left mortgages on it, because ho should have known that the land was not worth the price for which he sold it. The soundest men in the farming community to-day are those who stuck to their land during the boom and did not buy or sell. Previously, a man was considered to have a safe future if ho had bought in at the 1913-14 level, but values are now below that standard. Then, much of the sheep country has depreciated through the ravages of rabbits, which have made an unholy mess of it. It is only recently that the land has been coming back to its former condition. “It is a poor man in this or any other country who looks round for someone to blame for his disaster. No man should buy land who is not capable of leaning on himself as far as knowledge and cash are concerned. If he has to lean entirely on the agent who sells him the land, it is fair neither to the agent nor to himself. The best man with whom an agent can deal is the one who knows his business and is as hard as a naiL There have been too many ‘softies.’ ”