ENGLAND’S AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMME.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20485, 11 December 1934, Page 6

ENGLAND’S AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMME.

To-day’s Special Article

Similarity Between British and American Attack on Farm Problems.

By Louis M. Lyons

England’s farm marketing policies read like the American agricultural adjustment programme. Indeed, Major Walter Elliot, who is the Secretary Wallace of England, has gone out of his way to point out the basic similarity of Britain’s farm problem to America’s and to accept Wallace’s philosophy as tjie basis of his own attack upon the British farm surpluses. So England has her production quotas and her marketing boards, her milk pools and her wheat subsidies. The arguments pro and con on the “equalisation ’’ feature of her milk marketing scheme read like recent debates in New England.

JT IS the same equalisation, pooling the market among all producers alike, taking a special advantage away from some in order to give all a living. But the British marketing control goes farther than the American A.A.A. milk licenses. It names the price right through to the retail customEngland has her Consumers’ Committee, too, whose duty, similar to the New Deal’s Consumers’ Council, is “to consider the effect of any marketing scheme on consumers and . . . any consumers’ complaints." A plea for higher prices, more direct than any New Dealer has made, was addressed by the British Minister of Agriculture to the English housewife: “You have got to keep agriculture going. It is no use buying a thing cheaply and then go home and find you have put your man on the dole through doing it.” The farm and labour relationship is relatively easy to demonstrate in a close-knit land like England. British industrial workers have found the unemployment lines clogged by 150.000 farm labourers who have trekked to town over a 10-year period. By 1933 this trend has been turned. Agricultural workers increased from 809.000 in 1932 to 827,000 last yeai. Third Largest Industry. Agriculture stands as the third largest British industry. England has more men in farming than any of her Dominions. She raises food for 20,000.000 people, or hall her population. This intensive farming uses more labour than the same production in America. This both adds to the problem and aids the solution, if it has to be a political solution. The Minister of Agriculture has explained: “We realised there was no solution in lowering production cost if it meant destroying consumer power. So we started at bottom with the farm hands and planned that county boards should be set up under which wages were kept at what the best farmers were able to pay and not the worst.”

is the world bacon market. Ninety-six per cent of world export bacon goes to Britain. Her position as an importing country has made England’s farm problem much simpler than Henry Wallace’s. She has been able to practise most of her production control at the expense of foreign producers Her bacon prices, for example, are held up by limiting bacon imports to that part of the demand which the home producers do not supply. That England has abandoned her free trade tradition an'd is using tariffs to protect her farmers suggests how far khe has gone from the policy of letting nature take her course. She has rigorously reduced her proportion of imported foodstuffs from 60 per cent last year to 50 per cent this year. Britain goes America’s reciprocal tariffs one better with hard and fast trade pacts, and she has not hesitated to clamp on import quotas to exclude what her own farmers need to sell. By this means she has stimulated the home price of hops to a rise of 30 per cent. Duties on Dutch flowers have reduced imports from 4000 to 700 tons a year, and the home grower has stepped into the gap. Imports of potatoes and canned milk have been cut four-fifths Control of imports has stimulated British canning from a production of only 6.000,000 cans before 1930 to over 100,000,000 cans last year. Direct Subsidies.

But Britain has her direct subsidies, too. A processing tax on millers gave the British farmer last year a price 50 per cent above the world price on wheat. This grant was figured at enough to yield him cost of production. Typical of her surplus

control is England's potato scheme. The Potato Board is authorised to regulate supply to demand and “to prevent this surplus going on the market.” The surplus potatoes are literally screened off the market. A sieve is prescribed with meshes regulated to the size of the surplus. Potatoes that fail to go through the graded holes cannot be marketed. To enforce this, “ growers are permitted to deal only with merchants authorised by the board and no merchant will be authorised who buys potatoes which w r o not conform to the regulations."

Thus propped up. Britain’s farm wages scarcely fell in 10 years of her worst farm depression, and since 1933 they have shown a rise. “ The number of agricultural workers in the 25 counties where wages have been improved or hours decreased,” re-

ports Major Elliot. “ was 340.000 which was equivalent to nearly the whole of the cotton spinning and weaving industry getting a rise ”

The Government stepped in to prevent a threatened collapse of British agriculture in 1931 with a system of marketing schemes Each farm industry was induced to organise its own marketing programme in accordance with Government outlines. The biggest of these—the bacon marketing scheme—was preceded by a reorganisation •commission which determined how many pounds a year the British bacon market could use and prescribed the necessary regulation to preserve prices.

The marketing boards based hog prices on the cost of hog feed and supervised contracts with the packers to see that bacon prices met production costs. Between the autumn of 1932 and the summer of 1933 the price of bacon advanced from £2 14s to £3 10s. Incidentally, this helped hog prices all over the world because England

Withal Britain still has her surpluses, even as American agriculture has. Beef raisers in particular have been hard to help. The price of beef has fallen 25 per cent in three years. The present Parliament has voted a subsidy of £3,000,000 for this season to pay 9s a hundredweight to packers who buy the beef of Merrie England in preference to the beeves of the Argentine. A tariff is expected to follow. But the problem here is more elusive than one of controlling imports. For some reason Englishmen aren’t the stout beefeaters of old. In the five years to 1932 consumption of beef fell off from 69 to 60 pounds per person in England. American experience makes one wonder if it is not a more variegated diet that has hit the British beef market—if spinach and salads are not lightening up the heavy roast beef-and- \ orkshire pudding, kidney-stew-and-veal-pie dietary of John Bull’s vounger generation. (N.A.N.A. Copyright.) This is the fifth of a series of six articles outlining England's efforts to reform her economic system.