Imperial Myopia
AT a moment when Imperial co-operation and con- sultation - is by way of becoming a watchword the spectacle of the deliberate destruction of what is at once the most familiar and the most efficient of all instruments of Imperial co-operation is a matter for equal astonishment and regret. The story of the threatened death of the Empire Marketing Board is bound up with the story of its birth—and there are strange elements in both. The Board was created technically (in 1926) as an alternative to Imperial Preference, and there are many reasons for considering it a better method than tariffs for promoting the interests of Dominion producers. Be that as it may, there was admittedly a certain blind logic in the view taken at Ottawa last year that since Imperial Preference is now for better or worse an accomplished fact the ground for the Empire Marketing Board's continued existence has disappeared. In accordance with that view an Imperial Committee on Economic Consultation and Co-operation was appointed to consider the future destiny of various existing agencies, the Marketing Board foremost among them. That committee, which included two United Kingdom members out of a total of sixteen, declared in favour of the dissolution of the Board, and that recommendation has now to be accepted or rejected by the Government of this country and the Dominions. Meanwhile the financial provision for the Board's work comes to an end on September 30th.
But if there is, as has been said, a certain blind logic in the view taken at Ottawa and the recommendations of the Committee on Economic Consultation the blindness is a good deal more conspicuous than the logic—blindness to the Very remarkable work the Board has done in its seven years of existence and to the steady growth of its activities in fields lying well beyond the purview of its original founders. The Board has had its financial vicissitudes. The expectation of an annual expenditure of £1,000,000 has never been realized, the grant for the last full year, 1982-33, being cut down as part of the general economy campaign to as little as £300,000. On a fluctuating and never excessive income the Board has developed the ideal of Imperial co-operation with striking success in a variety of spheres. The part of its work that has struck the average man's imagination most is that the publicity it -has secured for the claims of United Kingdom- and Dominion products by the . organization of Empire Shopping Weeks and the highly artistic posters displayed conspicuously at points of vantage in London and .other cities. That is all excellent work—which financial stringency has seriously curtailed. To persuade people to buy Empire products voluntarily is a great deal better than to penalize them into doing it by making them pay more for the foreign article ; and if it be suggested that Empire goods are being pushed at the expense of the home producer the answer is that the Board's policy has always been to put the home producer first, the Dominion producer second and the foreign producer third. The largest individual grant made has been for - the improvement of the marketing of home agricultural products. But it is not for its posters- or its films, admirably adapted though the latter have been both for schools and for more general audiences, that the Board's right to survive should be recognized. It has- been doing, increasingly, something much more valuable than mere advertisement Consultation and co-operation are pro- cesses to be-pursued increasingly in all Empire, as in all world, relations, and the progress made. by the Marketing Board along those lines has been such that to arrest it how, even though -sonic of the Board's functions were redistributed among other agencies, would be the most deplorable retrogression. In almost every Dominion the Board has been stipporting or initiating research on questions sometimes affecting primarily the Dominion concerned but more often the Empire as a whole. In practically every case the co-operation is on the basis of equal financial contribution by the Board and the Dominion, which disposes of the contention that the United Kingdom taxpayer is bearing the whole burden of the work. Thus work carried out in co-operation with the Board (which rightly utilizes existing institutions where possible) has been in progress at Aberdeen in connexion with the handling and preservation of fish ; in Trinidad in connexion with the transport and storage of bananas ; in Australia in connexion with the im- provement of natural pastures ; in New Zealand into the relation of the iron content of the soil to bush- sickness ; in Canada in connexion with parasitic diseases of domestic animals ; in South Africa, at the Onder- stepoort Veterinary Research Station, in connexion with a wide variety of diseases of sheep and cattle.
That gives sonic idea of the range of the Board's activities geographically, but it leaves out of account the value of Much of its work to the colonial Empire as distinguished from the self-governing Dominions. In that field, indeed most of all, a continuance and expansion of its efforts are needed, for the Colonies are far less competent than the Dominions to initiate such scientific investi- gations for themselves. Catalogued in another way the Board's work would come under such headings as wool, dairying, poultry, entomology, plant-breeding, flax, pineapples, fisheries and so on, for in regard to each of those commodities the research set on foot, or assisted, by the Board has yielded results beneficial to producers over the whole of the self-governing and colonial Empire, while in- another field the marketing intelligence service, designed to keep producer and consumer in a relation continuously profitable to both, has proved itself so incontestably valuable that whatever else goes that activity at least is to be preserved.
As it stands today the Board exists to promote the sale of Empire produce by the best of all possible means, by proclaiming the merits of the Dominion products and by effecting steady improvement in the products themselves through such systematic research and experi- ment as has just been described—a collective activity whose results are at the disposal of all. If Imperial co-operation means anything, the case for the continuance and extension of such work as this is unanswerable, and it is. incredible that the Dominion Ministers with whOm the final decision lies should not see that. They are directly concerned, for if the Board is preserved, as it should be, the relatively small expense involved must be shared equitably between the different parts of the Empire: The special reasons why this country for a time bore the whole burden no longer exist. At such a moment as this a special responsibility rests on them. It has been the pride, and to a large extent the just pride, of the British Commonwealth that it has laid- before the world model of what co-operation between self-governing States should be. It would be a strange irony if at the moment when all humanity is gathered in London VI evolve methods of closer economic co-operation the Commonwealth should be assiduously employed in destroying an organization that in almost all its activities might be chosen as a pattern for the world.
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