Sre,—I suppose there is not one of us, in agriculture,
who wouldn't infinitely prefer extinction under the hammer of a Manchester economist to the death by a thousand patronages so cheerfully offered by Mr. Walter Worcester in your issue of May 21st. The title "Healthy Agriculture was perhaps the final blow. One sentence expressed the spirit of the whole argument so completely that it can only be quoted and left at that. " Surely if there is something inherently good in contact with Nature, the right course is to preserve our countryside intact for the city dwellers, and at the same time make our cities pleasanter and greener places in which to live." " Intact " is the word.
The general contention, that nothing but the most economically advan- tageous products should be produced in this island, is generally applied to agriculture alone of all our great industries. It is never, for instance, applied to coal. Coal is produced here, and has been for several years, under a tariff of about too per cent. ad valorem on its rival fuel oil. Every argument that your correspondent applies to food could be applied to coal. Even the argument of stopping tonnage. If we had bricked up half the pit-heads in this country and correspondingly enlarged our tanker tonnage it would no doubt have proved very convenient in some ways when the war came. And the saving thereby effected could have been used to buy and store " a reserve stock equal to a whole year's consumption " of oil, as it is suggested might have been done for sugar (protected by a tariff, or a subsidy, certainly no greater). And the miners could have gone on the dole, as the Green Commission suggested the sugar-beet workers should do.
The process of making mud into food is not so simple, or to be so airily dismissed as all that. If arable agriculture had not been supported through the grain and sugar subsidies, arable agriculture would have had to be supported in some other way. Or discontinued. And the country- side left " intact."
Nor is it to be supposed that the necessary funds can be all obtained by the formula of " rationalising our marketing and processing schemes."
That is to say, by ruining and driving out the shopkeepers and their assistants. It sounds different that way ; but that is what it comes down to. And that process has by-products, expensive by-products, of its own. Agriculture is an industry, an integrated industry , and at least Is much worth sacrifice to preserve as any other industry in the
Harwood, Bonchester Bridge, Hawick, Roxburghshire.
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