Farmer and Inspector
By H. D. WALSTON
AST summer I was in Ireland, in a cottage on the West Coast ; and-while I was there we were visited by an inspector from the Department of Agriculture. He was a pleasant, intelligent young man, with an agricultural degree from Dublin but with an entirely rural background, both his dress and his accent suggesting the farmer rather than the bureaucrat. The reason for his visit was that the usual variety of potato grown in those parts is suscepti- ble to wart disease which, in a bad year, can halve the yield of the plants it attacks. The Department of Agriculture had accordingly laid down that only wart-resistant varieties should be planted, and the inspector had come to see how far this policy had succeeded, and to explain to farmers the advantage they would get from following it.
Although his mission was to give advice rather than to discover and punish the wrongdoer, the whole neighbourhood looked on him as a foreigner, the representative of an unfriendly Government, and somebody whose main object was to make their lives difficult. One could see it immediately from the reaction of my landlord when he was asked by the inspector what variety of potatoes he was growing and if he could have a look at them ; and later that evening in the pub the talk was of the unwarranted interference and persecution by the Government of the harmless farmer. In the words of one of the farmers, " They can take me to court, and they can take me to gaol, but I shall go on growing the sort of potato that I always have grown."
A few days later I read in the local paper'sa report of a speech made by Mr. Dillon, the Minister of Agriculture, at a gathering of farmers not many miles from where I was staying. The gist of his speech appeared to be that there was enormous scope for expanded production in Ireland, but that this expansion could only take place if full use was made of scientific knowledge. The inspectors of his Ministry were there to supply this knowledge, and his intention was that they should be looked upon by the farmers as their friends and advisers and not as a form of secret police coming to see who was breaking the law. I could not help being struck by the similarity of the good sense contained in Mr. Dillon's speech to that in speeches made by Ministers of Agriculture in almost every country in Europe —including our own ; and I was struck, too, by the similarity of reaction of the farmer to the Government official in spite of the friendly words of the Minister.
For it would be wrong to dismiss the hostility of the Western Irish farmer to the Government inspector as something purely Irish. It is not a national reaction, but rather one that is basically agri- cultural, and found in all continents and in all countries. So long have farmers and peasants throughout the world been left to fend for themselves, and to receive visits from Government officials only when taxes are due or levies are being made for military purposes, that it will take more than fair words from representatives of the Government to root out this mistrust. Whatever the object may be— whether it be to prevent the failure of the potato crop in Ireland by ensuring that only resistant seed is used ; to increase the yield of the farm and the profits of the farmer, and at the same time' to prevent starvation in England or the Ruhr by ploughing up grass- land ; to improve the lot of the Hungarian peasant by land reform and collectivisation ; or to raise the standard of living of the African native by preventive inoculation of his cattle—the farmer's first reaction is : " There is a catch in this somewhere. The Government has never taken any interest in us before except for its own ends, and there is no reason to think it's behaving any differently now." The fact that this is frequently still true—particularly when it is a question of Communist land-reform—makes the task of the honest Government which is genuinely trying to increase production, both for the sake of the producer and the consumer, doubly hard.
We are living today in an era of international conferences and planning organisations meeting to discuss the future of the world. Even countries which do not believe in a rigidly controlled economy pay more than lip-service to the importance of making the best of the world's natural resources. Before doing this they realise that they must have information from as many countries as possible concerning the economic position, and, what is more, they must have forecasts of future production. Since the main economic strength of the greater part of the world lies in agriculture, much, of this information is in the form of agricultural statistics, and many con- clusions are based on estimates of agricultural development. The information is normally prepared by high19 skilled experts in Government offices, and is usually based on the theoretical assump- tion that a certain line of action will produce certain specific results.
It is a fascinating hobby, on which one can spend many innocent but unprofitable hours, to take an area of, shall we say, a million hectares in South-Eastern Europe, work out the location of dams and irrigation-channels, calculate the tons of cement and the num- bers of bulldozers required to construct these, lay out roads and villages, decide on a crop rotation, estimate the eventual yield of each crop in quintals, convert it into dollars at present world prices, and finish up with a staggering piece of arithmetic to present to the next conference, which will show that an investment of X million dollars will, in the course of ten years, produce annually ten X million dollars worth 'of food. Junior officials who worked out these plans might well expect to receive the equivalent of the O.B.E. in their country's next Honours List, while the senior official who presented them to the conference would probably be content with nothing less than a G.B.E. ; but ' if we regard such work as anything more than a harmless method of acquiring a cross to hang round one's neck, or some letters to put after one's name, we are in for trouble. These extra quintals of food which are to be produced do not depend mainly upon bulldozers and dams, but' upon the willingness of the cultivators of the soil to make use of new methods, i.e., their willing- ness to listen to the advice of the agricultural inspectors.
When plans for agricultural development are prepared, in no matter what country, the advice of scientists and technicians must be sought ; but of far greater importance is the advice of people who are well acquainted with the mentality of the farmer himself. Complaints are frequent enough even in England of Whitehall's lack of sympathy for farmers' difficulties, but at least our officials and farmers speak the same language, have a roughly comparable educa- tion, and confess the same ultimate loyalties. If, in spite of these similarities, there is still lack of mutual understanding, how much greater must it be in countries where civil servants are drawn from a social class entirely different from that of the peasant, where the one has received a good education and the other is scarcely literate, where the language of the Government is frequently unintelligible to the peasant, who speaks only his own dialect, and where even the tie of common nationality may not exist. Where such conditions are found—and they are, to a greater or less extent, in very many countries—no governmental plan of agricultural development, how- ever perfect it may be in technical details, is worth the paper it is written on until it has been scrutinised by those who are in a position to know how far the farmer will be prepared to co-operate.
These are things which it is hard to remember in the atmosphere of an international conference, but if the conferences are to have any success they must be remembered. It would help if at the head of every agenda were printed in large letters the words of the Irish farmer, " They can take me to court, and they can take me to gaol, but I shall go on growing the sort of potato that I always have grown
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