When I moved to report progress I said I wanted to raise a specific matter in connection with the administration of the Department during the past year. The Minister refers in his statement to the fact that there was a quantity of 240,000 tons of wheat which had to be disposed of by An Bórd Gráin either by export or by sale on the home market for animal feed.
I want to ask this question: is it true that we wound up by selling about 100,000 tons of this wheat to a Dutchman for something between £16 and £18 a ton at the end of a period during which we imported 1,250,000 cwts of pollard at prices varying from 18/- to 20/11d. per cwt? Would anyone explain to me also on what basis of calculation it was thought desirable to import 1,250,000 cwts of pollard at an average price of £19 a ton while we were selling 100,000 tons of wheat for export to Holland at a price of £16 or £18, more especially when during the earlier part of the year the minimum price at which that wheat could be bought here at home was £22? It was reduced to £20 a ton relatively recently and now I understand there is little, if any, to be had. If you go to look for it, you are told it has all been disposed of to the Dutchman.
It seems to me one of the oddest transactions we have ever engaged in. I should like to be reassured by the Minister that, if he finds himself confronted in any future season with 240,000 tons of wheat which he proposes to dispose of for animal feeding, he should seriously consider giving a preference to the home producer rather than selling it to the Dutch at a price less than the home producer is paying for imported pollard.
When I first mentioned this in this House I think the Minister sought to make the case that there was some fundamental difference between pollard and feed wheat. Of course, there is not. The process of making pollard is that you grind up wheat and you abstract from the wheat a certain percentage, and that percentage abstraction is pollard. You can extract 20 per cent., or 30 per cent., or 40 per cent., or you can extract any higher percentage you like. Naturally, if you are dealing with wheat which is convertible into flour, you make your extraction as low as you can because flour fetches a higher price than pollard and, therefore, it is easy to extract approximately 30 per cent. of pollard from whole wheat and sell the balance as flour. But, if you are selling the whole of the wheat for feed wheat, there is no reason why you should not extract 70 per cent. as pollard and leave the remaining 30 per cent. to be used either as flour or as a constituent of compound feeds. But one thing seemed to me perfectly manifest and obvious, and that is that it is daft to sell the Dutch Irish feed wheat at £16 or £18 a ton while we are buying over 1,000,000 cwts. of pollard at prices averaging £19 a ton. I should be glad to have some better explanation of that procedure from the Minister than he has made available to us heretofore.
The Minister said in the course of his speech that since the House recently had a full discussion on developments in relation to the organisation of European trade it was scarcely necessary for him to re-open the subject in any material way. I disagree with the Minister entirely. It seems to me that he has a very grave obligation to the agricultural community to give as clear a forecast as he is in a position to do of what the likely repercussions of the Common Market development will be on Irish agriculture. I think he has a pretty fair idea. It is true that no final programme has been fixed by the Six who constitute the present Common Market of Europe as to the final pattern that agricultural economics will have under the new régime but there is a good deal of material available in the Treaty of Rome itself to point in the general direction of what the repercussions are likely to be on the agricultural industry.
I think the Minister, with the additional information that he has at his disposal, has a duty to give all the guidance he can to the agricultural community here as to what the future holds for them. I am not in a position to provide an informed forecast in that matter because I have not access to the same material as is available to the Minister. Nevertheless, I dare to say that I believe that, given a right policy for agricultural production in this country, and the exploitation of the full potentialities of our 12,000,000 acres of arable land, it should be possible for the farmers to have a reasonably secure future in a Common Market world and, what is more important, to have a reasonable margin of profit on what they will produce for export in that common situation provided they are facilitated by the Minister for Agriculture and the Department to raise their agricultural output to its highest potentiality.
I do not think the Minister does justice to himself, to the House, or to the agricultural community by the kind of Delphic observation recorded at page 5 of his statement. He refers to the unsatisfactory prices for cattle which have been obtaining for some time and he states that certain factors have been suggested to him as giving rise to these unsatisfactory prices. "No doubt," he says, "all these factors operated, but if one adds them all up I am still left with the strong impression that they are not sufficient, in comparison with previous years, to account for anything like the full extent to which prices have fallen in Britain in recent months. It looks, therefore, as if there may be a factor or influence of some other but more obscure nature operating in Britain which has had the effect of making the decline in prices much steeper than most people could have expected." With all the information the Minister has, does he seriously tell us that there is some mysterious factor operating in Great Britain, the nature of which he cannot elucidate, because, if that is the case, things have changed very considerably since I was last in the Department of Agriculture?
In my experience very little could transpire in the markets in which we were vitally concerned that the resources of the Department could not detect. I do not know of any mysterious element that can be operating in Great Britain which could be beyond the capacity of the Department to disentangle and diagnose. I should be glad to know how it comes about that in this day and age we have reached a stage when we cannot, by an inquiry with our opposite numbers in Great Britain and through the ordinary trade channels to which we have access, find out this, or any other factor, that operates to the detriment of our livestock trade. Certain it is that the people who produce cattle and have them for sale have been having a very bad time for the last three years. In the spring there was some improvement in the price of cattle and it was thought that, perhaps, the depression was passed. Now we are right back where we were. Cattle are again hard to dispose of and selling at poor prices.
I often wonder when people recall the increased prices of cattle that were exported, the increased total of money secured by the sale of cattle, does anybody ever ask himself how each of these individual cattle fared? Does anybody ever ask himself in this House what did the men who produced the cattle make out of them? You can sell 40 cattle in the morning for £2,000 and yet lose £400 on the transaction, if you had to keep those cattle for longer than you should. You can sell 40 cattle another year for £2,000 and make £400 on the transaction if you have been able to sell them a bit earlier and get a better price for them because they are young. In the statistics they both appear as 40 cattle earning the same amount of money but, for the individual farmer, they represent between modest comfort and inevitable bankruptcy.
Sometimes when I hear statistics thrown about this House I wonder do those who refer to them so glibly ever think of what they mean to the individual farmer. I would like to ask the Minister one specific question. There has been an export subsidy operating in respect of fat cattle and meat. I understand that there is some change to be made in that subsidy and some people were under the impression that it was to end on 1st August. I understand that there is now some provision for its extension and I would ask the Minister to let us know if that is so.