WHEAT AGREEMENT.

Wairarapa Age, 29 August 1933, Page 3

WHEAT AGREEMENT.

PRESS COMMENT IN BRITAIN. SOME HOPES OF RET.IF.F. AN INSTALMENT OF PROGRESS. RUGBY, August 26. The agreement reached at the Wheat Conference receives a generally good. Press in this - country. No commentator considers for a moment that a restriction of output, although no doubt inevitable if any progress was to be achieved, is the ideal way of effecting a return to normal conditions. But when the intractable nature of the five-year-old wheat problem is considered together with the diversity of interests involved, the agreement reached, even though its terms represent a compromise which may not be always easy to carry out in detail, is generally welcomed as a substantial achievement. Several newspapers describe it as an important instalment of the programme of economic recovery which the World Conference was called together to frame. FACTORS IN SUSPENSE. “The Times?, n while extending a warm welcome to the agreement which it considers may help a solution of other difficulties which appeared insuperable at the World Conference points out that “the benefits to be expected are contingent not merely upon ratification by a sufficient number of ’Governments to enable it to be put into force, but also upon the effectiveness of the steps agreed upon to bring about a rise in world price, and therefore in the long run contingent upon the way in which the importing countries interpret in practice the general undertakings which they have given to the exporting countries in return for the very definite steps which the latter have pledged themselves to take. These undertakings, in spite of their vague and indefinite character, are to be welcomed as the first real indication on the part of countries which have hitherto pursued a policy of extreme agrarian protection, that they are prepared to consider some modification of that policy in general interest, provided that the interests of their own .producers are properly safeguarded? 1 The “Morning Post” thinks that the conference has done a useful piece of salvage work. The plan itself is not heroic nor 3, short cut to salvation, but, compared with the result of some other conferences, it is a real triumph. It may also have advantageous secondary effects, if it encourages farmers to sub- , stitute mixed farming for excessive reliance on one product. A VICIOUS PRINCIPLE. The “News-Chronicle” says: “The agreement represents esesntially one more effort to raise .prices by artificial scarcity—a thoroughly vicious principle. The best that can be said of it is that it is only a two-year plan to deal with an abnormal crisis—a glut. The only ultimate solution lies in the willingness of European countries to abandon policies of economic nationalism which they have been pursuing at the cost of dear bread for their own people and ruin for farmers overseas.” The “Manchester Guardian,” which also dislikes the restriction -principle, adds, “but one surveys without hope the alternative—a continuing glut added to each year by highly protected countries exporting a relatively small surplus, irrespective of cost and holding to ransom those better fitted to export, but dependent upon exporting at a profit. If the Wheat Conference has saved the world from that madness, it has not laboured in vain.” The “Daily Telegraph” hopes that the agreement may lead in time to a further measure for organised production and the marketing of products which .plays so great and vital a part in international economy.—(British Official Wireless.)