Before turning to the general subject matter of this Estimate, with which I was dealing when the House adjourned on Thursday last, I want to interpolate a comment on an incident arising during Question Time to-day. Deputy Esmonde raised the question of the terms of the Agreement under which sugar was being exported to the United States of America. The Minister for Agriculture replied that the terms of that Agreement are available for perusal to anyone who wants to get full details in the Library. I asked the Minister, by way of supplementary question, whether it was not so that the Agreement to which he referred as being available in the Library referred to last year and could he give us the particulars of the new Agreement under which it is proposed that the United States of America should purchase 10,000 tons of sugar. I pointed out to him that the American newspapers were full of a story that a rider had been attached to a Bill as an emergency measure, called the Honey Bee Bill, in the American Congress, one of the results of which was to provide a quota of 10,000 tons for Ireland in the overall import quota of the United States of America for sugar, and I was told the Minister for Agriculture knew nothing about it. If he does not, it seems to me to be one of the most extraordinary things this House has ever heard because if the Minister for Agriculture of this country is to learn of the availability of a market for Irish beet sugar through discussions in the Congress of the United States and the comments thereon by American newspaper men, Dáil Éireann would appear to be in a very bad way.
It is certainly a source of embarrassment to me to learn of these developments for the first time from the American newspapers and to discover that our Minister knows nothing about them and seems to care less. I hope that before this debate concludes, he will be in a position to give us some information of the terms on which we have secured a quota of 10,000 tons of sugar of the American import programme and what, if any, corresponding obligations devolve on us. Last year, we undertook to import 50,000 tons, I think, of coarse grain in excess of our average importations of the previous three years. Whether any such obligation obtains in connection with the new arrangement, nobody seems to know and Dáil Éireann ought to be informed by the Minister for Agriculture as soon as may be.
I want to draw the attention of the House to a fact which is only too manifest to those of us who live in rural Ireland but of which the Government's spokesman, the Minister for Agriculture, appears to know nothing, that is the steadily declining standard of living that is being thrust upon the farmers, with special reference to the farmers who run their own holdings, the men with 50 acres and less. Usually, when we talk of the cost of living, we associate it with employed persons and its impact upon them. What a great many Deputies and a great many members of the Government seem to forget is that 90 per cent. of the small farmers are in exactly similar circumstances to employed labourers, except that instead of working for wages, they are working for themselves. They are self-employed because we deliberately set out to make them so. There was a time when they were not, when they were all rent paying tenants but we abolished that system and we made them owners of land working for themselves. This has had certain consequences, as a result of the activities of Fianna Fáil to which I want to direct the attention of the House, in a way which I do not think Deputies advert to at all.
In Table 10 of Economic Statistics to which I have already referred, the profits from agriculture, forestry and fishing are set out for each year. In 1957 these profits were £108.6 million. In 1958 they had fallen to £97.4 million. In 1959 they had risen to £106.5 million. In 1960 they had come back to the figure of 1957, £108 million. This year the Minister boasts that they have increased by a further £8 million but he has quite overlooked the fact that over the period to which these figures refer there has been a drop of 17 per cent. in the value of money. The cost of living has gone up 17 per cent.
That rise in the cost of living impinges just as directly on every small farmer in Monaghan, Cavan, Donegal, Leitrim, Mayo, Galway, Sligo, Clare, Limerick, Kerry, Cork— and many other counties in Ireland where one does not think of there being small farmers at all, like Meath and Laois-Offaly, where we ordinarily think that all the farmers are big farmers but where there are a great many small farmers too—as it does upon a man working for wages or a salary.
This means that the £ in 1961 is worth the equivalent of about 16/2 in 1957. That means that the profits of the agricultural industry in 1957 were £108 million. According to the estimate in Table 10 of Economic Statistics issued prior to the Budget 1962, the profits accruing to the farmers of the country at large are now £116 million but in fact that means the equivalent of £96.3 million as compared with £108 million in 1957. It is astonishing to me that nobody adverts to that fact.
I suggest to the House that in terms of real money the farmers today are receiving approximately £15 million less for their labour than they were getting five years ago. That is the reason why the Minister for Lands is making plans to take over the derelict farms in Mayo, Monaghan, Cavan and the other counties where the bulk of the land is in the hands of the small property-owning farmers. It is because the Government have forgotten this category of people, it is because the Government have not realised that the wage earning classes and the salaried classes got the seventh round and the eighth round of wage increases to compensate them for the rising cost of living and that these people got nothing, that a very large percentage of these people are giving up the fight, selling their land and going to England in search of work.
I want to direct the attention of the House urgently to the fact that that disastrous development, that effective reduction in the income of the small farmers, will not only leave considerable areas of the land derelict but will react on the towns and villages as well. The business people in the small towns and villages in Ireland are discovering the growing flood of emigration of their customers is circumscribing and reducing their business with consequential reduction in employment and a further contribution to the tide of emigration to the United Kingdom where the industrial machine is still prepared to absorb a very considerable number of our people. But the element of the population which is going is the element of which this country stands in most urgent need, and that element is the boys and girls between the ages of 18 and 25. They are not only the most dynamic and precious element of the community but, from the purely economic viewpoint, they are the consumers, and anyone who has any experience of business in rural Ireland realises that their disappearance is playing havoc with the small towns and villages of this country, to the great detriment of the whole social structure of rural Ireland.
What horrifies me is the conviction that the Government themselves either do not know or do not care about what is happening to this element of our society. I think that the most important, valuable and permanent feature not only in the economic but in the social life of this country is facing prospective destruction and that this is a great disaster for Ireland. I believe we could take effective measures forthwith to reverse this process and I am hopeful that an effective Government could do so. I am hopeful that we can get this Government out so that another Government can do what requires to be done.
What does require to be done? What requires to be done is to expand the output of the land of Ireland and to provide our people with the means effectively to market an enormously increased output from the land. From that point of view, I want to direct attention to an extract from the Report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation on agricultural commodities with projections for the year 1970, in which it says:
While surpluses may increase, says an FAO report on Agricultural Commodities—Projections for 1970, malnutrition will remain widespread in many low-income countries during the '60s. The report says that per caput intake of animal proteins may not exceed 10 grams per day in the Far East in 1970 against present levels of 40 grams in the European Economic Community and 65 grams in North America.
I should like to add that it is manifest to everybody that one of the problems existing in Africa is not hunger because, in fact, in most parts of Africa there is an abundance of food, but an acute protein shortage which has resulted in widespread deficiency diseases. That is of peculiar interest to us because if there is any country in the world fitted for the wholesale production of animal protein it is our own country.
Therefore, we have every reason to believe that given effective marketing techniques there is an enormous potential market for animal protein and I do not believe that with the emergence of the European Economic Community and its ultimate association with the United States and other freedom loving nations of the world like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, this new association will stand idly by and let the peoples of Africa and Asia fall into the Communist grasp as a result of unrelieved poverty and distress. That means that the resources of the EEC plus those of the Americas, will sooner or later be effectively deployed to bring within the reach of these peoples in Africa the animal protein they so need and which, according to the FAO Report, will continue to be needed for many years ahead.
Our country should face that future with courageous conviction that, given reasonable means to produce, we could make a great contribution to fulfilling that need. To bring about that contribution what must we do? The principal source of protein production here should be in the form of meat and meat products. We are adequately equipped to provide meat products through the immense potentialities of our grass land. One of the most alarming features of the situation at present obtaining here is that there has been an actual decline in the number of cattle on the land. There were 112,000 fewer cattle in this country at the last enumeration than at the previous enumeration. I believe that can be remedied. This decline in our cattle population may be the result of the efforts at eradication of bovine tuberculosis. However, it is necessary to realise—and it was so stated to be in the original document published over the name of Mr. Whittaker, the Secretary of the Department of Finance—that in the economic expansion envisaged for this country, nothing is more important than that the cattle population should be expanded.
That can be done, and it can be done largely on the basis of grass. There was a time when Fianna Fáil took the attitude that grass production was something ignoble. They have now come round to the conclusion that it is one of the most important features of our economy. Yet hundreds of thousands—in fact, perhaps millions—of our acres of grass are as bad as they can be. The reason is perfectly clear—the absence of an adequate agricultural advisory service. It has been suggested you cannot provide these agricultural advisory services any faster than the people demand them. I want to suggest that is a completely illusory approach.
The duty of an effective Minister for Agriculture is to provide such advisory services so that they will be available to the people when the people are prepared to take them. It is an odd thing to find that the very farmers who most urgently stand in need of advice are very often the farmers who are most reluctant to accept them, in the same way as it is true that the industrialists who most need advice to bring themselves into line with their requirements to meet the E.E.C. challenge are very often the very ones who will not do anything about it and whom it is most difficult to persuade to learn in order to face the new competition inherent in the Common Market.
I believe that we should provide without delay the advisory services in agriculture without which effective progress is impossible. I should like to see it extended to the point where we have a trained agricultural adviser in every rural parish in Ireland, of which there are 800. That may not be possible at the beginning but it should be our ultimate objective. Even if we begin with one trained adviser to every three parishes, we would be making an immense advance towards achieving what is so badly needed.
I do not believe there is any use in offering advice to people unless it is financially possible for the people in question to accept it, and act upon it. It is for that reason that we in the Fine Gael Party advocated all over the country during the past general election that, having supplied an effective agricultural advisory service, we believed the Government should make available to the small farmers credit, interest-free, of up to £1,000 for any scheme of increased production on which they were prepared to embark under the direction of, and in consultation with, the national agricultural advisory services.
I believe that could be done. If it were done it would confer immense benefits not only on the farmers concerned but on the country as a whole. In view of the fact that the Minister says he never subscribed to the view that the land rehabilitation project was not a valuable national service, I hope he will realise the measure of his own mistake in wiping out the credit facilities which were made available under Part B of that scheme. When it was suspended, a very large number of farmers who urgently required facilities under the land rehabilitation project were denied them because the credit facilities which used to be available were no longer available. If he does not restore it, some day we will.
I believe it is an essential part of developing the agricultural industry, over and above the actual advisory and credit facilities which we have suggested, that we should put an end to the inadequate housing that obtains on so many small holdings. We have recognised our obligation in that regard in the towns and cities, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of small holdings where people are living in wholly inadequate housing conditions. We take the view that steps should be taken forthwith to improve those conditions by making it possible for the small farmer through the Land Commission to get himself a new house and, having availed of the grants available from the Department of Local Government and the local authority, have the balance of the cost charged on his annuity to be paid off over the surviving period of the land annuity attached to his land.
That scheme has the advantage of making it possible to ensure that in the building of these houses there would be adequate technical, engineering or architectural advice available to ensure that they are properly built, and, secondly, it has the advantage that the house is there as part of the holding and in the event of any subsequent transfer from the present occupier of such a title there will be no hardship on his successor to continue the payment of the annuity because in addition to the land he buys he will get a new house.
I want to direct the attention of the House to a suggestion I made already that the milk industry, which can be described as the foundation of the livestock industry, requires to be reorganised on its supply, processing and marketing sides. I held the view for many years, and I do not deny it, that we should preserve at any cost the small individual co-operative unit in rural Ireland. It has great sociological advantages that the local creamery should be intimately associated with the local group of suppliers. I think there is a great sociological advantage in that arrangement but I believe world competition has now become so acute that we cannot afford to surrender the efficient rationalisation of the industry to the sociological advantage of intimate contact between the individual co-operative unit and the actual supplier.
Therefore, I think the whole creamery industry calls for review so that we might amalgamate a great many of the small inefficient units into large groups which would have at their disposal the maximum efficiency which maximum capitalisation and modern equipment would make possible. If we were to do that we would discover, as has been discovered in some of the larger groupings which have already taken place, that the increased efficiency of the processing would make available up to 2d per gallon in the cost of handling the milk, which might very advantageously be used to pay the producer a premium on top grade milk.
The plain fact is that the quality of the milk reaching many creameries is such that it is fit only for conversion into butter. There are many other processes to which it is not susceptible owing to defects in quality. I do not propose to weary the House with any attempt to describe the technical facets of this whole question of quality. It is sufficient to say that I believe we could get an immense improvement in the quality of milk if a premium were payable for high grade milk, and if the creamery industry had access to a growing volume of top grade milk, it would make available to an efficient creamery industry a larger and wider diversification of its end products than is available to many small creameries at present operating.
I believe, furthermore, that in addition to the increased efficiency that could be brought about by these groupings of creameries, we could at the same time, without any additional capital expenditure, handle and process a far greater volume of milk than is at present being handled. That far greater volume of milk could be produced from the same land as is at present producing it if the grass husbandry practised on the land were brought to the standards of husbandry possible in this country if proper methods are used.
One of the strange and interesting things is that so far as I know our methods of growing cereal and root crops are as good and as up-to-date as those operated in any other country in the world. It is only in respect of grass husbandry that we have fallen so disastrously behind, and the tragedy is that there is no branch of agricultural husbandry for which this country is better suited than grass production. One of the elements in our society which must bear the responsibility for that is the Fianna Fáil Party which, over the years, sought to establish that grass was the hallmark of bad farming. They have woken too late to the discovery that good grass is the hallmark of really good farming, but in the meantime considerable psychological damage has been done and it will take some time to correct this illusion of Fianna Fáil.
Therefore, if we got increased the quantities of milk and could process it with no serious increase in our overheads we might produce an added margin of profit which would be a further inducement to our farmers to improve the quality of their milk or to improve the method of marketing at present employed. I remember on one occasion being told by one of the most experienced creamery managers in this country that in the area served by his creamery an agricultural parish agent, appointed by the Department of Agriculture, was appointed. The area he served approximated to about one-third of the creamery area in which this manager worked. He said that in two years he saw an increase in the milk supply from that area where the parish agent was at work which, if it extended to the whole of the creamery area, would have meant an increase of 1,250,000 gallons of milk coming into that creamery and that, had that increase been effective, it would have been possible for him to pay from 1d. to 1¼d. more to the farmers because he would have been able to process that extra milk without any substantial addition to his capital costs.
It is, then, in increased volume, in increased efficiency and in a diversification of end product, with effective marketing procedures, that there is unlimited scope, in my opinion, for increased milk production in this country and a corresponding increase of the agricultural income of the people. But I do not want the House to lose sight of the fact that the Food and Agricultural Organisation prophesy that for the next ten years animal protein will be the principal deficiency in the dietary of the undeveloped nations and that one of the most desirable forms of animal protein for transfer to these areas from the temperate climates such as we inhabit is dried milk.
I believe there is an almost unlimited market for that product, once efficient marketing procedures to distribute it are established. Our land and our people have an almost unlimited capacity to fill that requirement. At the same time, we shall have, as a by-product of the dairying industry or we can regard the dairying industry as a by-product of the cattle industry—whichever is the by-product and whichever is the main stem, there will result, with an increased output of milk, an increase in our cattle population.
So far as I can see, the prospects of the markets for live cattle and meat and meat products in the EEC— which will consist, in my confident belief, not of six but of ten after Great Britain and Ireland, Denmark and Norway join—are bright. We shall have and continue to enjoy for veterinary reasons associated with our insular situation a preferential status on the British market where British farmers will continue to want our cattle in order to maintain their programmes of beef production. Over and above that, we shall have access to the whole area of the ten, with the prospect of having the joint resources of the ten employed and opening up demands for animal protein in Africa and the Far East, to all of which our meat products can make a very material contribution.
Therefore, we have no rational reason to apprehend the absence of markets, given our concentration on the expansion of supplies of animal protein in this country. Animal protein consists of many things — meat, milk, cattle, sheep, mutton and lamb. Nobody on the Continent of Europe eats mutton or lamb at the present time. It is quite an unusual dish. I do not suggest to the House that you can change the eating customs of a population like the French, the Germans or the Dutch overnight or indeed over quite a long period.
However, nobody in this country has any notion of what it could mean to this country if Europe began eating lamb. There would be opened for us a vast additional market which it would test the resources of the existing supplies available to supply. I believe, in the long term, that is one of the great benefits that will accrue to us under the new Common Market dispensation but it is not one on which I wish to dwell now.
I want to refer to the problem of bacon. I know that when I was in the Department of Agriculture they adverted to this but I often wonder now whether they advert to these things at all. It appears to me now that all useful activity in the Department of Agriculture is being shed to boards outside the Department of Agriculture until the point is reached where the Minister for Agriculture feels entitled to come in here, shrug his shoulders and say: "I have no responsibility; it is a matter for Bord Bainne, the Pigs and Bacon Commission" or some other board which he has set up.
I cannot see that the Minister for Agriculture ever has the right to come into this House and disclaim responsibility for the development of the agricultural industry of which pigs and bacon constitute so vital a part. I want to put this point to the House. Why is it that Danish bacon today is making 40/- a cwt. more on the British market than Irish bacon? That represents approximately £2 a pig.
I want to suggest to the House that the Danish farmer, as a result of superior strains of pigs, is getting, on the average, a conversion rate of 1 lb. of meat to 2.8 lbs. of feeding stuff while we are getting a conversion rate of only 1 lb. of meat to 3.2 lbs. of feeding stuff. If that reckoning is correct, then the Danish farmer is getting £1 per pig more out of every pig he produces as a result of its superior capacity to convert feeding stuffs into meat than we are. I should like the Minister to be able to tell me —he ought to know—whether or not it is true that the Danish factories are able to get, between bacon and offals and by-products, £1 a pig more out of every pig slaughtered than we are able to get in the factories in Ireland? If these propositions are true, and I believe they are true, the Dane is getting £4 per pig more than our farmers get.
Now, part of that extra amount which the Dane gets he takes in further award and part is devoted to putting him in a more competitive position on the market where he operates. These advantages are accessible to us. He gets 40/- a cwt. more for his bacon on the British market partly as a result of the superior uniformity of his product but mainly as a result of his superiority in marketing his product.
The Dane considers his extra and foreign market to be his first charge on his industry as a whole. Therefore, he is able to guarantee a constant supply of uniform product to the British market which he wants to serve. He is able to say to the wholesaler in Great Britain that if he will contract with his central marketing organisation to take 90 per cent. of his supplies from Denmark, they are prepared to give him very special concessions by way of guaranteeing that if the price goes up in any week, he will not have to pay the increase in price, whereas, if the price goes down in any week and if he has bought bacon, they will refund to him any reduction that may be made in the course of that week.
I believe if we had supplies, we could operate a similar marketing system. Our trouble is that we cannot do it over the whole of England because we have not adequate supplies, but if we took a restricted area around Liverpool or Birmingham or any other centre of population of our own choosing and really organised marketing in that area effectively so that we could guarantee every week of the year a constant supply and if, in those areas, we were able to offer terms as advantageous as the Central Marketing Organisation of Denmark offers over the whole of England, at least we should get a footing. I believe, having done that, we could gradually expand to meet Danish competition in marketing all over England.
I believe that the conversion rate of feeding stuffs into meat is a matter of progeny testing. I set up a progeny testing station in Cork in 1958 which was opened by the present Minister for Agriculture just after I had left office and we have been talking ever since 1957 about opening a second.
Now I am told that the second station is about to be opened at Thorndale here in Dublin. But that was five years ago——