I would ask the Minister to look at the terms of the Trade Agreement negotiated between this country and Great Britain in 1948. In the Agricultural Annexe to that Agreement there is a special paragraph dealing with butter, paragraph (g), which sets out that the Government of the United Kingdom undertake to import butter from Ireland at the annual prewar rate of 20,000 tons or more if available at prices to be fixed by negotiation between the two countries as soon as the possibility of exports arises.
In Article V of that Agreement, the Government of the United Kingdom
. . . undertake that where goods, the growth, produce or manufacture of Ireland, are dutiable at preferential rates of duty, they will not vary the existing preferential treatment of these goods in such a way as to put any class of goods, the growth, produce or manufacture of Ireland, at a disadvantage in relation to goods of that class from other sources enjoying preferential treatment.
That is contained in the Trade Agreeement, the first Article of which reads:
Having regard to the wish of the Government of the United Kingdom to obtain increased quantities of cattle, eggs, and potatoes and to resume as soon as possible the traditional imports from Ireland of bacon, butter . . .
I find it hard to see how the action of the British Government in imposing a duty of over 200/- per cwt. on our butter is not in direct conflict with the terms of that Agreement.
There is a provision under that Trade Agreement that if either party wishes to abrogate it, it is open to them to do so on tendering six months' notice to the other party. Nor do we forget that under that same Trade Agreement, Britain bound herself at the time it was negotiated to furnish us with certain specified quantities of coal— that is in Article 6—and shortly afterwards the British Government found themselves in a position of acute difficulty and they were unable to get the coal to fulfil that agreement on their part and, on their submitting that difficulty to us, my recollection is that we substantially waived that provision on the ground that we fully accepted their good faith and firm intention of doing what they undertook to do but which they had found themselves temporarily unable to perform.
I find it very hard to believe, with my experience of negotiating with the British Government of that time and since, not only personally but through officers of my Department, that we would meet in London an attitude of entire indifference to the obligations of that Trade Agreement and the obligations mutually borne by both parties to so old a trade association as that which has existed between ourselves and Great Britain. It seems fantastic that we should be described as dumpers of butter in the British market when it is demonstrably true that we were selling butter in the British market before certain countries which came to be its main suppliers now were even discovered and that we have been suppliers of butter to Britain down through the ages.
I say that very deliberately I want to refrain from the expression of any sentiment that might make the situation more complex than it already is. I speak as one who has been consistently concerned for the maintenance of the most cordial relations between ourselves and the people of Great Britain, an attitude for which I make no apology here or elsewhere. I have never concealed my view in public that I regard cordial political and trade relations between this country and Great Britain as being of infinite value to both of us and, speaking in that role, I cannot refrain from saying that if it had been announced in the British House of Commons that it was proposed to impose a duty of virtually 100 per cent. ad valorem on a substantial export from Yugoslavia, Poland, or Czechoslovakia or Guinea, there would have been an outcry of indignant protest from various interests in Great Britain who would have seen in this a gesture of monstrous indifference to the interests of a friendly power.
The main distinction seems to be that we sit with Great Britain as fellow members of the Organisation for European Economic Development with the astonishing result, as we discovered, that Great Britain declares what almost amounts to an economic war with us. I deplore that; I think the decision taken by the British Government and the form of its announcement is regrettable in the extreme. I would warmly urge on our Government to adopt whatever measures may be necessary to restore the position and, in that regard, I do not think it would be unseemly for us to realise that Great Britain has her difficulties also.
We all know that Great Britain is engaged in delicate negotiations in regard to the Common Market in respect of which New Zealand is peculiarly sensitive at the present time. We can understand the desire of Great Britain to spare the feelings of New Zealand and give her every reassurance of their solicitude on trade matters of vital interest to her. We are aware that Great Britain, involved in the same negotiations, and linked to Denmark, under the European Free Trade Area is anxious to afford Denmark the most earnest reassurances of British good will and solicitude for her economic interest. Her obligations to Poland and some of the other countries mentioned are not so immediately manifest but we must face the fact that the unfortunate origin of this 4,000 tons proposal, which we have rejected, was an obiter dictum handed out by the secretary of GATT who knew “sweet Fanny Adams” about the problem that he was dealing with but who, I have no doubt, concentrated eagerly on the material supplied by the Central Statistics Office of GATT which told him that the average annual sale of butter in Britain was such and such and that he averaged these figures and produced out of his hat this marvellous proposal which nobody approves and which had only one thing to commend it—that it was universally rejected by everyone.
But it did provide some kind of yardstick eagerly seized upon by the British Government because it had this characteristic, that it gave New Zealand everything she wanted, New Zealand having been the only Power that consistently said that she did not want to discuss any equitable distribution of butter imported for the British market at all.
Anyone who has any experience of dealing with international organisations knows that it is the ambition of the international civil servant to be friendly with the bad dog. I have a healthy respect for the negotiating capacity of my old friend, Mr. Holyoake, who is now Prime Minister of New Zealand and whose zeal and courage and resource in the defence of the interests of his own people have often commanded my admiration at international conferences where he used to appear as—I think—Minister for Agriculture of New Zealand at one time. He is certainly Prime Minister now.
The GATT proposal provides that New Zealand will be entitled to send actually 11,000 tons more this year, I think, than it sent in the period 1934 to 1938. I cannot vouch for that figure, but it certainly provided a ratio which was very acceptable, naturally and understandably, to New Zealand. It is very understandable that in that context the British Government grasped at a straw, a straw which would shift from their own shoulders the responsibility of portioning out between a large number of friends the available butter market in Great Britain. The unfortunate fact is that every one of the 15 or 16 other countries participating in this butter market in Great Britain found themselves prepared to accept the GATT provision and we were forced into the difficult situation of being the only one to say we could not accept it and regarded it as a matter of principle to reject it.
I want to put it to the Minister for Agriculture that, understandable as that attitude was, is it not desirable that we should try to break the deadlock? The British Government are in the difficult position of being committed to this scheme which makes provision for only 4,000 tons from Ireland. Everybody else has accepted it for reasons that we well understand, because, under it, most of them have got all they wanted, and some rather more than they had hoped for. Admittedly, we have got the worst part of the deal. But we have got our Trade Agreement.
Is there no means of saying to the British Government that we do not want to embark on a period of virtual warfare between us, arising from no ill-will on either side, tracing its origin to a proposal which did not originate either here or in Great Britain, but which was made by a third party with little knowledge of the traditional trade patterns involved and eagerly adopted by 15 of the interested countries, of which we are the 16th? Is there no means of saying that there remains a clear obligation on the British Government under the 1948 Trade Agreement, which they have indicated no intention of abrogating and which we do not want to see abrogated? Could we not consider some such figure as 4,000 tons for the purpose of maintaining their face, if needs be, on the understanding that at an early date that figure would be reviewed and, under our special trading relations with Northern Ireland, where a large proportion of our total export butter goes, a modus vivendi might not be discovered between now and March which would enable a satisfactory trading in this butter to be resumed on terms which did not involve a penal tariff which, whatever the British Government intended, must leave a deep sense of grievance in this country, if it is persisted in.
I want to go on record as saying that, if we make any mistake in our method of marketing our butter abroad, it is that we are too honest. By that, I mean that, if we provide an export subsidy, we do it for all the world to see, and make no bones about it. I assert that there is no country in the world exporting butter to Great Britain today that is not substantially subsidising its exports. The difference between our method and that of the other countries is that they conceal their methods of export subsidies. In New Zealand, I believe the device is a loan. You lend the money; you do not give it. In Denmark, the device is, I believe, a headage subsidy related to cows, not butter. In other countries, the subsidy method is so devious and difficult to follow that no one but a professional economist and statistician can understand it, much less describe it, but in each case it operates effectively as an export subsidy.
It is all nonsense to say that we are dumping butter at cut-throat prices. We would be delighted to take 460/- for butter, if anyone would give it to us. It gives us no pleasure to sell butter at 215/- per cwt. I can never understand the mentality of people who talk about our dumping butter. We have not the slightest desire to dump butter. We believe butter is worth 460/- per cwt., but that belief does not persuade anybody else to pay us that sum. Like anybody else trading in the markets of the world, we have to take what we can get for our butter.
Now we are not being asked to take what we can get. We have been suddenly informed that in order to get access where we have traded for the past ten centuries—and we must be the only country in the world that can make that claim; we have probably traded in butter in Great Britain for at least ten centuries—we will have to pay an import duty of close on 100 per cent ad valorem before we are allowed to trade there at all.
These considerations might give rise to expressions of furious indignation if we dwelt on them excessively. I do not think that indignation can do anything on either side to help resolve this deplorable situation. A Davenport may cheer from the back benches of the Tory Party but we have our own lunatics in Dáil Éireann, too. Every group has its share of daft individuals.
I do not believe that in the British Government we need have any reason to apprehend sentiments of enmity to this country. I believe that, by and large, the leaders of public opinion in Great Britain are as anxious for cordial relations between ourselves and them as we are. Speaking as one who has spent most of his public life in the effort to promote good relations between our people and the British people, I earnestly hope and pray that a way may be found out of the present impasse and that the normal trade between us may be restored at the earliest possible time. The all-important thing, in my respectful submission, is for both sides to avoid taking up inflexible positions now. The sooner a degree of flexibility is restored to this situation on the basis of mutual goodwill, the sooner, I believe, it should be possible to resolve what is a most distressing and deplorable situation.
I think it is a strange world in which we live—we talk about dumped butter and surpluses of food—when we turn to the news bulletin of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers for October, 1961 and find on Page 4 a headline which reads: "People outgrow food production." We have just had a session of F.A.O. in Rome where some of my old and valued colleagues have been waving the Malthusian flag again. I.F.A.P. warns us: "People outgrow food production."
What is the next part of it, on the same page of the news bulletin of I.F.A.P.? It is: "More grains, more butter, more sugar." The last page of the bulletin of the I.F.A.P. is devoted to F.A.O. commodity forecasts:
There is an unmanageable surplus of wheat. The 1961-62 season begins with 3,000 million bushels of excess corn. The coffee surplus at the start of this season is at least 3.5 million tons. Cocoa production this year will be higher than last year. The surplus of cotton at the start of this season is 2.2 million bales. The shorter outlook for sugar is basically bearish because of a sharp increase in 1961. The increases in butter production last year again resulted in serious problems. Rice in the past year has been at its highest post-war level and North American beef production will increase.
Yet on Page 2 the Lords Boyd-Orr, Russell and every daft peer of the peerage is disinterring the hoary body of Malthus to warn us all that we must sterilise one half of the population and introduce the remaining half to the methods of birth control for fear we might beget too many children and be eaten out of house and home. Yet, after they have all delivered their impassioned orations in Rome, ask them to look around them and consider that if their fathers or their grandfathers were as lily-livered as they themselves, they would never have been born. They do not acclaim that sobering thought. They are always wanting somebody else not to be born but none of them wants to avoid being born himself.
In that situation, we are constrained to speak here of unmanageable surpluses while O.E.E.C., F.A.O., U.N.O., G.A.T.T. are prepared to produce masses of paper but ask them to transport one stone of surplus from a source of origin to the hungry multitude and they throw up their hands in despair and say it is impossible, but if there was a pint of oil situated in the most inaccessible recess of the Sahara Desert requiring the investment of countless millions to bring it to some Mediterranean port, it would be done in the flash of an eye. Yet we are told that the surplus production of this country constitutes a menace internationally and requires the output of something approximating an economic war between our people and the British people with whom we have been trading for a thousand years. If this is not the language of madness, I do not know what it is.
But, the urgent necessity at the moment is that this impasse be ended and that friendly resolution of what appears to be insoluble should be found. I think it can be found; I think it should be found and I think it can only be found by both sides to the present situation making it abundantly clear that neither wants to have "face" involved but that both are concerned to make concessions in order to restore the status quo so that the future may proceed—on the kind of lines that most people, I believe, wish it to do.
I could say more on this subject but I do not propose to say any more because I think I have said enough to make it quite clear what our view is and I do not think it is necessary for me to re-emphasise to the Minister the extreme gravity of this situation if it is not corrected forthwith, as I believe it can and should be, by goodwill on both sides.
The export figures to which the Minister has referred do not strike me as being peculiarly exciting. Our exports of cattle in 1957, taking fats and stores together, amounted, as far as I can find out, to 551,600 head. In 1960, taking fats and stores together, the total exports amounted to something like 380,200. I find it hard to believe, and yet the statistics seem to suggest, that our total exports of butter in 1957 amounted to 315,900 cwts. and in 1960 to not quite half that, to 150,400 cwts. What I find it even more difficult to understand is that our exports of bacon and ham, which were 305,500 cwts. in 1957, rose to 579,500 cwts. in 1958 and are now running, in the year 1960, at 458,400 cwts. I thought they had increased. Possibly in 1961 they will show that increase but these figures would not suggest that, and that in spite of the fact that in 1960 the subsidies on exports of fat cattle to Great Britain were very substantial; they amounted to £2,080,000 on 172,000 head and the export subsidy on beef was £1,761,000 on 721,000 cwts.
It is borne in mind, of course, that both those subsidies were got as a device for stimulating the bovine tuberculosis eradication scheme but at the same time it is well to remember that, so far as I know, it is the first time in our history, since the economic war in any case, that we have ever subsidised exports of cattle to Great Britain and it represents a significant departture from the record that we had maintained so far.
This Estimate is of so wide application that we could discuss the whole agricultural industry relevantly in connection with it. I do not propose to do that because I want to highlight the matters to which I have referred.
I do want to point out that while I welcome increased appropriations for An Foras Talúntais and the work that it is doing, there is no use doing research in this country if we have no effective machinery to bring the fruits of that research to the farmers of this country so that it can be used for the expansion of production.
I want to say that at present over a great part of this country there is no effective advisory service and it is a matter of the utmost urgency that such should be provided. I travel through the country a great deal and see with horror the thousands of acres now that are under rushes and scutch grass that are really going back to the mountain for the want of the knowledge on the part of the people who own it as to how best it could be used. I see with horror and dismay hard working men working twelve and fourteen hours a day for seven days in the week and getting a return for their labour not much more than 50 per cent. of what it ought to be because their hard labour is not illuminated by the knowledge and skill which modern techniques would make it possible for them to avail of.
The more I consider this problem the more convinced I am that without an adequate national agricultural advisory service we can make no real progress to getting from the land of Ireland much more than one-half of what it is capable of producing. That is a catastrophe from the point of view of the nation as a whole but it is a disaster from the point of view of the farmers themselves.
It would be outside the scope of this Supplementary Estimate to examine the whole question of marketing but I am satisfied that in the years that lie ahead, despite the Lords Boyd-Orrs and the Lords Russells of this world, there will be a growing demand from a growing world population for the kind of food that this country is peculiarly equipped to produce. I am convinced that as the free countries of the world, unite in a developing Common Market, which will ultimately include the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and all the free countries of the world, it will cease to be true that mankind would be prepared to spend millions to bring oil from the centre of the Sahara and yet refuse to spend shillings to bring food to the hungry of the world.
Therefore, I am convinced that a competent programme of expanded production on the land of Ireland would be amply justified. I am convinced we have the men; we have the land; we have the climate and we have the know-how. The one thing that is lacking is the machinery to bring these things together for the advantage of us all. For some strange reason, the present Minister for Agriculture has had hitherto an insurmountable prejudice against any effective plan to achieve that end. The tragedy is that the people who are most likely to benefit most from it have themselves a strong prejudice, which has to be overcome, against modern methods and advice as to how best to use them on their own holdings. Any sensible Minister for Agriculture would accept that fact and seek to surmount it.
I see with something approaching despair the agricultural community of this country growing poor and I see the growing disaster of a rising generation turning its back upon the land. If that is allowed to happen, then as certainly as we are in this House, the national sovereignty of this country will disappear. Unless the land of Ireland is made to play its part in the economy of Ireland, Ireland as a separate entity cannot survive. I am certain that the land of Ireland can and should play a great role, not only in the economic but in the social life of Ireland.
I wish that we on this side of the House had the opportunity of putting our hands to that task. When we had that opportunity, we had no reason to be ashamed of our record. It may be a year or two before we get the chance again. In the meantime, I wish the Minister for Agriculture we have at present would do something, or else make way for a colleague who is somewhat less somnolent than he.
