Bureaucracy Must Not Control Agriculture
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C INCE a very early stage in the war,
suggestions have been put forward.
that the farming industry should he kept urder much the same sort of control in peace-time as it has been during the past five years: Wellintentioned people, some of Ahem in positions of influence,. have been so impressed by the success of the efforts of the Ministry of Agriculture to increase food production that they hold the view that the methods adopted for the emergency should be perpetuated.
That opinion is, of course, much to the taste of those folk who have a natural liking for regimentation, and there is probably, by this time, a considerable interest working to, secure the continuance of the County War Agricultural Executive Committees, the Machinery Pools, and all the rest of the war-time set-up. They present their case, as a general rule, with scathing criticism of the efficiency of British farming as it was just before the war.
The argument, as put forward by one of these critics, can be simply stated It is that the dear, good Government has taken in hand the farmers with beneficial results. He concludes that this happy state of affairs should be maintained.
Government Tries to Make Amends
In point of fact, what really happened was quite different, and the conclusion is, therefore, based on false premises. The dear, good Government was not so much setting the farmer's house in order, as its own. It was trying to put right, in a matter of months, the mistakes of British agricultural policy over a period of years, amounting in fact to more than half a century. The stupidity and laziness had been at Westminster, rather than on the land.
To explain the position further. On the outbreak of war a Government is faced with two main problems in connection a ith supplies; those of munitions and those of food. As Lord Portsmouth once wrote, " Munitions are the material of war, but food is the munition of life."
In order to obtain munition production on the requisite scale, the Government had, as we know, to create factories, to finance enterprises, and to exercise a considerable measure of control upon manufacturers and, for that matter, upon their, employees. It had to possess the power both to aid efficiency and to deal drastically with inefficiency; it has such power, and Uses it.
Precisely the same general principle had -to be applied to the agricultural industry. Th,n-e had to be grants of various kinds to farmers, whose operations had further to be guided and, in Some measure, controlled, It was
necessary, too, to make it easier to get an incompetent agriculturist off the land. A tenant-farmer can, in peacetime, be made to relinquish his holding, on the ground of bad husbandry; there has been an extension of the principle for the duration of the war, but it is not a novelty.
Government contra 1, exercised through the County War Agricultural Executive Committees is, therefore, essentially a war-time measure, and it is one, further, that need not, have been applied—at any rate in anything like its present degree—had our farming been in a reasonable state of prosperity just prior to the war, and capable of producing supplies adequate to national requirements.
The fact that it was not prosperous, but on the contrary in the depths of depression, was not ,primarily the industry's fault. It was due, essena tially, to the fact that a succession of governments had allowed farming to become less and less of a paying business in this country.
The position, say, in 1937, was that the industry was practically bankrupt; that a huge proportion of the good soil of England had tumbled to weeds, and that agricultural labour was grossly underpaid. It was then the case, not merely of improving our agriculture, but of re-colonizing whole areas of rural Britain.
Those facts are not in dispute, and the foregoing is a fair summary of the position Certainly, the County War Agricultural Executive Committees fulfil an extremely useful purpose under the present 'conditions of emergency. They do their work well, but that it not to say that they ought to continue to function any longer than may be considered necessary.
Present Committees are Voluntary
For one thing, it may greatly be questioned whether the present Committees would themselves consent to serve. Their members are voluntary, and are called 'upon to give up a good deal of their spare time to a job that is often thankless and sometimes distasteful. They undertake it now as a matter of duty, but they might not view it in quite that light in peacetime. 1 should, in fact, very much doubt whether any but a small minority would be prepared to carry on.
A further point must, unfortunately, be made about the salaried officers of the Committees. A good many of them, no doubt, would be glad to continue to function after the war is over, but whether or not they would make a particularly good job of peace-time agriculture is rather another matter. Excellent as many of them no doubt are, and well-meaning as all of them may be, the fact does remain that some " War-Ag " workers are not, even now, too knowledgeable about their subject, or any too clever in their judgments.
It is a commonplace, in market-day discussions, that to have failed in farming seems to be the main qualification for a post, under the local committee, whilst, of course, a proportion of these officials can claim no previous experience at all of wqrk on the land. All that is quite inevitable in present circumstances, but that does not alter the fact that there seems no need to perpetuate it.
That being the case, it would seem that the system .could be kept going only by making yet further additions to the ranks of paid officials; that is,' by an increase in bureaucracy. The control of the agricultural industry by public servants would, in my view, be bureaucracy in certainly one of its worst forms.
Why a Stranglehold on the Farmer?
An equivalent proposal for, say, the mptor industry, whereby the manufacture and distribution of motor vehicles would be directed by civil servants, would raise an outcry, and no sane and responsible person would advocate such a policy for the motor trade, or any other ordinary line df business. Yet, some people want to try it on the unfortunate farmers, Why they should be picked upon for the experiment is difficult to imagine, as they ate just as,capabIe of running their own industry as is any other-body of business folk.
No, the answer is not to run our . agriculture as one of the bureaucratic rackets. It is rather to give the farmers the ordinary commercial chance to conduct their own affairs with efficiency. That will, of course, mean a reversal of the town-minded policy that government after government has adopted towards agricultural questions for so' many years, and with results that have been entirely disastrous towards both the industry and the prosperity and health of the Nation at large. The reversal has, in fact, been started, and there are many reasons for believing that it will be continued. F.J.