Well, I do not know. It should not be, I suppose. Keeping these objects in view the Government say that we should set up a board. All it says about a board is that there should be an independent chairman, and that the board should have on it representatives of the curers and representatives of the producers. I should, of course, say to Deputies that the idea of issuing a White Paper is to give the Government opinion of what should be done so that it might hear in advance what the criticisms of its proposals are. If there is criticism which the Government thinks is well justified it can change the system to suit the view put forward and then bring a Bill in. If the Bill were brought in first it would not be so easy to change the whole foundation of it even though one heard fairly good criticism of it.
These are the points which the Government is laying down as the future policy in regard to pigs and bacon. I have referred to the headings which deal with the small matters. I now come to the others. It is proposed to give the board power to acquire and operate or close any bacon-curing factory that may be offered for sale. The board can erect new factories where, in its opinion, they are needed, and it can control the sale or transfer of bacon factories. These, of course, are very big functions to give to the board. I think they are necessary if the board is to do very much good or effect an improvement in the whole industry. The board will also have to sanction the transfer or sale of a factory by one curer to another, or it can transfer or sanction the sale of a factory by a curer to some outside person who comes in. The board may not sanction it; it may refuse to sanction it. It may say that it will buy the factory itself. That is not set out in the White Paper. There is no great detail in the White Paper. It only sets out the principles on which legislation will be based. That, of course, would be provided in the Bill. If a curer wants to sell a factory and the board wants to buy it, both parties will try to agree upon a price. If they do not agree upon the price there must be some system of arbitration.
There are areas in the country where is has been claimed by the people concerned that new factories are necessary. I think myself that the areas in which that claim could be justified would number very few. There may be one or two areas. The board, in order to get the most economical working in the bacon industry, may say that it would be good business to build a factory in certain places. If the board so wishes it can do so. Again, if it buys a factory which it thinks is not necessary in a particular place it can close it down. The board will have power to buy factories, to build factories or to run factories. If it builds or buys a factory and decides to run it, it will have the power to do so.
The next point deals with amalgamations. In certain cities and towns you have more than one factory. It appears to be rather wasteful and uneconomic to have two, three or four factories in one town or city. It would appear that one well-constructed modern factory would be very much more economical to run, and that, consequently, savings would be made in the industry. If the board comes to that conclusion about any particular town or city it may serve notice on the proprietors of the factories concerned to the effect that they ought to amalgamate. It can advise them strongly to come together and try to negotiate an amalgamation of two, three or four factories. If these proprietors agree to amalgamate then, of course, everything will be all right, but if they are unreasonable in their refusal to amalgamate—they will get plenty of time to think about it because it is not intended that these things should be rushed—the board will have power to approach the Minister for Agriculture, and say that, in its opinion, it is necessary and essential for the smooth and economical working of the industry that an amalgamation should take place between certain factories in a certain town or city. If the Minister for Agriculture thinks that the board has a good case he can say: "Well, I agree with you, but I must get both the Dáil and the Seanad to agree before any compulsion of that kind can be used." A scheme will be put before the Dáil and the Seanad, setting out where the factories are and the lines on which amalgamation is proposed by the board: that is, in what proportion the shares in the new company, to be formed from the three or four existing factories, will be held by the existing factories, and stating where the new factory should be located and which of the existing ones should be closed down. That scheme will be presented to the Dáil and the Seanad, and if it is approved, then the board will have power to go ahead and put it through. Naturally, if there is amalgamation of that kind and if, say, three factories are amalgamated, only one will then be working. The other two can be closed down.
Probably the most important provision in the scheme outlined in this White Paper is the purchase and allocation of all pigs offered for slaughter. I have come to the conclusion, and I have come to it, I must say, on the evidence submitted to me by those who have been working this scheme—not only members of the board but some curers too—that a fixed price can never be enforced for pigs unless there is a system of buying, unless, in other words, the board does all the buying of pigs itself. Now that may appear a very unwieldy and a very drastic system for a start-off, but I think it can be worked in a reasonable way. There are at present 39 factories. The pigs normally come in to them from the farms in their areas. I do not know how many fairs and markets are held in the country, but there must be a great number. If a farmer has been accustomed to bring his pigs to a certain fair or market he should be allowed to continue to do so, that is, if the fair or market is of any size. It might be unreasonable to expect a buyer to attend specially if only four or five or a dozen pigs are usually offered at a market. The board, in undertaking this system of buying all pigs, will have a representative at every factory and at every fair and market, and these representatives will buy the pigs. That is the only way, in my opinion, in which a fixed price can be enforced. There is no doubt whatever about it that in the past—I believe that this was not the only country that had this experience— when the price for pigs was considered a bit too high by the curers, they were able to get the pigs cheaper by various subterfuges. A farmer goes in with a lorry load of pigs. He is told by the curer that he cannot take them. In the curer's estimation, the official price is too high. This unfortunate farmer, after hiring his lorry, goes out and sees a man standing outside the gate. He may or may not know that he is a pig buyer. In reply to this man, he says that the bacon curer will not take the pigs. He says he will buy them. But there is an understanding between the curer and the buyer.
There are curers who are capable of working a system of that kind. On the other hand, when pigs are scarce and curers are competing for them, they will give more than the fixed price. But that increase may not go to the farmer who suffered in the other case. If we want to enforce a fixed price for pigs at all times, the only way to do it, in my opinion, is to have this board doing all the buying. The next point is that the board should regulate the marketing of pigs, bacon, pork, and pig products. In that, a number of things are involved The committee speak about paying a price according to grade and about the provision of reasonable uniformity of product. They also mention this question of export. At present, we are not producing sufficient bacon for ourselves and the consumer will buy any bacon he can get without complaint. If the time ever comes when importing countries will have a choice of bacon from exporting countries, we shall have to be careful in having a certain uniform market. That was what affected us very badly before the last war. When I asked a group of bacon wholesalers who came over here on a visit what the faults of our bacon were, they said that it was the best bacon they could get but that they could never get the side they wanted. If they ordered a hundred sides of bacon of a certain type and a certain weight from our curers, they said that they could not get that type of bacon, that they might get four or five sides of that type and then sides of other types. In the case of the bigger exporting countries, they could get any number of sides to any specification they might lay down. When exporting again, we must have regard to the uniformity of the article and that can only be done by giving the board power to fix the price according to grade. Secondly, it is necessary to have some control over the factories as regards the type of article they produce and, thirdly, it is desirable to have control over the export market so that one agency can do all the exporting. In that way, there will be a better chance of a reasonable quantity of any particular type and of a reasonable variety when any order comes from an importing country. Those are the points that arise in that White Paper.
I now pass on to the White Paper issued this morning. That Paper deals with tillage, crops, pastures, fertilisers and feeding stuffs. The Committee on Post-emergency Agriculture issued a number of interim reports dealing with veterinary services, dairy produce and egg production. Then, it came on to the question I have just mentioned. It gave a great deal of time to these questions, and, in the end, found it impossible to get unanimity amongst the members on the questions concerned. Accordingly, we had a majority report and two minority reports. We examined those reports in the Department. I took what I thought was best in them and made certain recommendations to the Government. I should like to deal, first, with the tillage point, because it is the point likely to lead to most controversy. In 1939, when the war broke out, we, in the Department, found that, in certain districts, the technique of tillage had been lost. There were no implements, no horses and no tractors. There was not sufficient labour and the labour available was unskilled so far as tillage was concerned. I remember seeing, in 1940 or 1941, a letter sent by a farmer in the Midlands asking that an inspector call to tell him whether his wheat was ripe or not. That was the case in certain areas. In other areas, tillage was well established, and there was no trouble. That is the first thing we have to keep in mind. We must be careful that we do not drift back at any time to a position of that kind. As has been well said, the last war took some years to gather momentum. We got plenty of time to prepare our resources. We may not always get so long a time. We may have to jump quickly into the breach and produce our own food in the event of another war. In no consultation that I had with the consultative council or members of the county committees of agriculture did I meet anybody who did not hold that tillage was essential to good husbandry. Everybody, I think, agrees with that. Some members of this Post-emergency Committee say that the object of tillage is to get good pasture and others say that the object of pasture is that it should be followed by good tillage.
Whatever the object, we all agree that tillage is necessary if farming is to be carried out properly. It was very well put in one of the reports—that the ideal thing was to take the plough around the farm, that is to take all the land in turn and keep it tilled in turn. I think we are all agreed that good farming, anyway, means a certain amount of tillage.
I think I could go further and say that most people hold that we shall not drift back to the same position in which we were in 1939 and that a good many farmers who were anti-tillage in their outlook before 1939 now realise that tillage is a good thing for the farmer as well as for the country and that we may therefore have a good deal of tillage without any compulsion at all. There will be admittedly a few recalcitrants. It is obvious that if a few farmers, who may have very good land, just go back to pasture and say that they do not approve of the tillage business, they will not be getting as good an output from the farms as if they were tilling. I think if the great majority are going to till anyway and if only a small minority are going to do the wrong thing—the wrong thing for the country and for themselves — compulsion is perfectly justified.
Of course, when the object is, first of all, from the national point of view, or perhaps I should say from the protection point of view, merely to preserve our tillage technique, our tillage machinery and the skill that is necessary and if it is necessary for good husbandry to do a certain amount of tillage, it will not be necessary to maintain the present percentage. We can lower the percentage—I do not know to what point. That would be a matter that would require consideration. I do not think either that it will be necessary to make any order or any regulation in regard to the crop which should be grown. That will be laid down in a general way in any scheme that will be brought in.
The next matter with which I should like to deal is the question of wheat. A number of considerations have to be kept in mind, but we say in this White Paper that, as soon as normal conditions return, compulsory wheat growing can be dropped. Normal conditions would, I think, mean, first of all, that imported wheat is freely available and, secondly, that there is no difficulty with regard to either shipping or exchange. Of course, there would be no inducement to stop wheat-growing unless imported wheat were much cheaper than the wheat we were growing ourselves.
If all these conditions were present, I think that we could then return to the pre-war policy of growing a certain amount of wheat, that is, that we fix a price for home grown wheat that will induce farmers to grow wheat up to, say, a quarter of a million acres. It may be held by some that there is no necessity for any wheat policy, but I think we would be very foolish if we dropped the wheat policy entirely and went back to the 20,000 acres because, as I have already said, we may not get such a good warning the next time there is a war. We may not get so long a time to prepare and we should, in all safety, try to have at least 250,000 acres. If we had that we could, the following year, jump to double that and be fairly safe as far as bread foods are concerned.
As regards beet, the same considerations apply, that is, in regard to sugar being freely available and exchange and shipping being fairly easy. There again, however, we would have to maintain the machinery so that we could produce all our own sugar if necessary. That would mean that we should grow sufficient beet to keep the four factories going. What the definition of keeping them going is, I cannot say at the moment. We had four factories going pre-war on 40,000 acres. We have 80,000 acres now, but it might be possible with safety to go back to the 40,000 acres again.
Barley is the next crop with which I desire to deal. It is laid down here that there will be a fixed price for barley for malting and that other barley offered for sale, if of good quality, would be bought at some lower price and used for feeding. I think it is stated in the White Paper that this barley would be purchased by the central cereals authority—whether we may call it that, I do not know. There is a central cereals authority referred to which will import all the maize. They would also buy surplus barley. There are two separate transactions to be considered. They would buy this barley from the various merchants who would collect the barley at whatever the fixed price would be. They would re-sell the barley to the millers at what the millers would think it was worth in the ordinary way and the difference would have to be made good by the central cereals authority.
