I move:—
That, in view of the present emergency, the Seanad is of opinion that commercial and agricultural policies should be reviewed with a view especially to the maximum immediate increase of agricultural production and employment.
I would like to express the hope that at some stage in the proceedings in this debate one or more of the Ministers will be present because what we have to say seems to me at any rate to be of a certain importance, and it is being put in such a way as to be helpful rather than otherwise to Ministers in the very difficult responsibilities which they are now facing. I was quite aware, Sir, that we could have raised all these points on the general debate on the Adjournment, but it seemed to me that if we followed that procedure what was likely to happen was that Ministers would have made an opening statement and then there would have been a certain amount of criticism, especially from this side of the House, and the general tone of the debate might have developed in a direction which would be psychologically rather objectionable, because when a Minister makes a statement, the instinct of people, especially of those who normally are in opposition to the Minister, is to criticise and, when criticised, the instinct of a Minister is to defend himself, quite naturally, and in the result perhaps the debate is not quite so constructive and so helpful as it might be. By taking this line, by proposing a definite motion, I seek to make a certain positive contribution to the matter under consideration and, therefore, in a sense, I put myself and Senator Baxter puts himself on the defensive and we give the technical advantage to the Minister or Ministers in their reply, if they wish to make use of that for debating purposes. Further, it creates this psychological advantage, that if we have anything to say of which Ministers approve they can with a good grace accept our suggestions and take full advantage to themselves for whatever may be the result thereof; whereas, in the other event, there is some danger of the debate developing in non-constructive directions.
The problem of increasing our agricultural production is intimately bound up with the problem of our economic relations with our great neighbour and I would suggest at the outset that we should approach that problem in a spirit of frank collaboration with our neighbour, collaboration, if you like, in sympathy for a common cause in respect of which we are legally neutral, but in reference to which we cannot possibly be morally neutral, for we are deceiving ourselves if we do not realise the fact that in certain events, if the western wall of defence on the Rhine should break down, it is quite probable that the Swastika instead of the Cross will float, not only over the western portion of the Continent of Europe, but over these islands. In general, however, I would suggest that if we approach our British neighbours in a spirit of frank collaboration and with the declared intention of endeavouring by every possible means to increase our agricultural output and the volume of our agricultural exports to them, if we put it in that form, we will make it easier for them to agree to those necessary imports of raw materials for our industries, new and old, which we require their co-operation in securing. Certainly our bargaining power in securing the necessary imports for our industries will be greatly improved if we can in any way expand our agricultural exports and make ourselves economically more worthwhile to our neighbours in their present time of great trial.
I do not want to be critical of the Government with reference to its general policy in this crisis but I cannot help saying that I got the impression that they were somewhat "moidered", if I may use a common hibernicism, in their attitude to the crisis—that is somewhat bewildered— and did not give that clear lead in economic or other matters which we look for from a Government which is responsible for the national welfare in a crisis of that kind. Looking at it solely from the economic point of view, I regard the present world crisis as it affects us—I was nearly saying as a Heaven-sent opportunity, but what it really is, is a Hell-sent opportunity— for us to put our national economy back again on an even keel and to liquidate all the mistakes we have made in the last eight or ten years.
It might be asked, although I do not think it will be asked, whether it is in any way departing from the spirit of neutrality, if we seek to increase our exports of food to our belligerent neighbours. In that connection, I would point out that in 1920-21 when this nation was at war with Britain, we nevertheless maintained our food exports to that country and were only too glad to be paid for them in sterling. In fact, in those exciting days, if the British had refused to take our agricultural exports we would have regarded it as a most unfriendly act and would have made the welkin ring with our complaints. The inference from that important fact is one or other of two. Either Great Britain is the national enemy only in a somewhat Pickwickian sense or we are, in our relations with the national enemy, following the teaching of Christian ethics rather than the modern international practice, and we believe that when our enemy hungers, we should feed him and that when he thirsts, we should give him drink. We claim the right at all times, whether at war with Britain or in a condition of friendly neutrality, to export as much Guinness as possible to that country.
We come now to the problem of unemployment, especially urban unemployment which seems to occasion, as I think, disproportionate concern to the Government at the moment. When we are faced with the problem of unemployment, due to some sudden dislocation in economic circumstances, the correct line of approach is to seek out in what directions it is still possible for the national economy to expand, and to use every means in our power, including appropriate State action, to bring about an expansion of economic activity in the directions in which such expansion remains possible, because such expansion will not only increase directly employment in the expanded industries but, indirectly, will have favourable reaction even on other industries which do not appear at the moment to be directly affected by such policies. We had an example of that in the years following 1932 when suddenly our normal economic expansion in the direction of agricultural production and export, was brought up against a blank wall and a serious dislocation of our economy was threatened. The Government of the day prevented what would have been a serious collapse of the whole national economy by their vigorous expansion of industrial development. Whatever I might think of that policy, as compared with other policies which would have been possible if we had avoided that blank wall, nevertheless on the assumption that the blank wall was inevitable, the policy of economic expansion in the direction of industrial development was not only desirable, but without it the nation would have fared much worse than it has fared.
Now we are face to face with a situation of an opposite kind. We find that, owing to various causes, industrial development must either come to an end or at all events its object must be to maintain its present position rather than to expand. On the other hand, we find that there is a limitless market for such agricultural expansion as may be possible under present circumstances and therefore, as I would suggest, the wise policy is to use every effort to expand agricultural production and exports and to increase employment in the agricultural industry, bearing in mind that, not only directly, but indirectly, such increase will have favourable reactions on employment in urban as well as in agricultural industry. If we make a direct attack on the phenomenon of urban unemployment, which is now exercising many peoples' minds, we are likely to indulge in most expensive methods of dealing with it, which will only have the effect of increasing the national debt. If we make this indirect approach to the problem of urban employment, and concentrate rather on expanding rural employment, the final result will probably be that we shall expand exports and sterling balances and increase the creditor position which this nation already enjoys in relation to its neighbour. Of the two methods of dealing with unemployment —one which increases the public debt of the State to the creditors of the State and the other which increases the credit position of the nation in relation to the neighbouring community which will be increasingly its debtor—I infinitely prefer the second method.
You may say: "What is the use of expanding agricultural exports to our great neighbour, to be paid for by increased sterling balances, which are likely to have a diminishing value if a depreciation of sterling should take place and which, in any event, are not likely to be balanced by an equal increase of imports of real goods and services from our British neighbours whose resources are now fully occupied in the prosecution of the war?" In the first place I should like to say, with all the emphasis at my command, that the inflation, or at all events the progressive inflation, of sterling is by no means inevitable. It is true that as compared with six months ago or a year ago, the £ sterling now buys only about four dollars whereas a year ago it bought about four dollars and 80 cents. In the last month or two, there was a fall in the value of sterling from about 4.60 to about four dollars but it is evident, I think, from recent statistics that the policy of our neighbour is to maintain the value of sterling at its present four dollar level and the effect of the fall to four dollars from 4.50 will be to raise, in due course, the price level of precisely that section of our economic production which was unduly depressed in the years following 1933. In other words, that change in the exchange value of sterling when it has time to work itself out, must lead to an increase in the price of goods imported into Britain and of goods produced in these islands which are in competition with goods imported into Great Britain from overseas. Therefore, we may look to the devaluation of sterling which has already taken place as a factor tending to increase the price level of our agricultural exports and to restore the equilibrium in favour of our agricultural producers which all the efforts of the past five or six years have been unable to restore.
But it is not to be taken as axiomatic that sterling will go on depreciating. My reasons for saying so are, partly the evidence derived from the character of the recent British Budget which shows a determination to meet a larger share of the cost of this war from the proceeds of taxation than was aimed at or achieved in the course of the Great War. We do not perhaps adequately realise the enormous financial strength of our British neighbours. In the present year, at the beginning, the national income of Great Britain was running at the rate of some £6,000,000,000 a year, equivalent to an income of some £120 per head of the population. In our own case national income is some £150,000,000 a year, equivalent to an income of some £50 a year per head of our 3,000,000 population. Now, at the present rate of public expenditure in Great Britain, on both ordinary and war purposes, a sum of £2,400,000,000 would be expended in a complete year, and it is likely that that rate of expenditure will increase rather than diminish as the months go on. Even if the total British Budget of expenditure rose to £3,000,000,000 a year, and even if we regard the whole of that expenditure as pure waste from a certain point of view, although a certain portion of it will still be expenditure on constructive services provided by the State and not all of it will be expenditure on war: even, as I say, if we regard the whole of that £3,000,000,000 expenditure as pure waste there would still remain some £3,000,000,000 per annum of national income possessed by our neighbours which would enable them to have on the average a standard of life corresponding to an income per head of some £60 a year—about £10 a year per head more than we enjoy who are not taking part in any war at all.
Now, these facts are sufficiently surprising, but I have them on the authority of an article which appeared in the Economist and they certainly impressed me with their significance. I would like to pass them on for what they are worth. We may take it then that British policy will be to maintain the value of sterling, and to avoid anything in the nature of large scale inflation, so that we may with confidence continue to export, and to expand our exports and be content to take payment in the form of increased sterling balances possessed by our banking system and of increasing deposits by our farmers.
We come now to another question to which I think I can give only one answer and that is: can our agricultural production be increased? I think it can, although, of course, in all agricultural matters quick results cannot be obtained. Any considerable increase of agricultural production must be a matter of years rather than of months; but, at the same time, as I will show later on, it is possible now to take certain steps which in the course of six months will make a substantial increase in our agricultural production possible. Now, I think that in pursuing a policy of increasing agricultural production we should not revolutionise the general character of our agricultural economy. We should aim at increased tillage, and at the production, especially, of roots and forage crops: of those things which can be used either for feeding animals or for feeding human beings. If it had not been for the fact that we have already expanded wheat production in the last few years, and done so to some extent at the expense of the fertility of the soil, I would advocate a substantial acreage of wheat, but I think we have already enough wheat acreage under cultivation to meet our minimum requirements, on the assumption that we can continue to import wheat reasonably freely in the next year or two, and in the belief that we have already a substantial store of wheat in the national granary. The danger with reference to wheat is that unless the wheat is grown in rotation, and that you have an adequate area of root crops, it leaves the land very dirty and destroys the fertility of the soil. I am told by farmers, who know what they are talking about, that far too many acres of land have suffered in that kind of way, and will take years to recover the fertility that was lost by this process of snatching a cash profit from wheat crops in an unbalanced rotation. Consequently, by all means maintain your 200,000 acres of wheat production, but especially exert yourselves to increase the area under roots, thus taking care to restore the manurial constituents of the soil, because a succession of cereal crops, especially wheat, will destroy the soil.
Further, it was questioned in the other House whether it was wise to aim at an increase of live stock. In my view we should aim not only at an increase of tillage both for the feeding of man and beast but also at an increase in the numbers of live stock. I know quite well that it takes about 6 cwt of wheat or other cereal products to produce 1 cwt. of beef or meat products. But our grass, and there still will remain millions of acres of grass, is authoritatively said not to have been fully used by live stock and there is no other method yet devised by which the equivalent of grass can reach the human stomach except by feeding live stock on it. Therefore our aim should be to increase the number of our live stock as well as our tillage products for the feeding of live stock and for feeding human beings.
Now, it is always possible for a country which specialises in live-stock production, and which aims to produce a large share of its winter feed from the products of its own tillage, to treat that live stock as a kind of reserve of human food supply. If feeding becomes short and there arises competition between humans and live stock for available food supplies, it is always possible to kill off surplus stocks of live stock and consume them directly, and then feed ourselves on the food which the live stock would otherwise have consumed in a normal economy. Live-stock production provides in that kind of way a sort of double guarantee of human subsistence, partly through the surplus flocks and herds that can be killed off if food should run short, and partly from the food intended in the first instance for flocks or herds that would be capable of being switched on to human consumption if times should become really very hard.
It is surprising how much of the things we normally give to pigs and hens, and even cattle, that human beings could eat if they had to—not that we want to do it—but we can subsist on much of the food which we normally give to live stock. The chief items in our existing economy, apart from dry cattle, are pigs, poultry, cows and sheep. The pig population of this country has remained more or less stable somewhere in the region of about 1,000,000 pigs for the last half century or more. In my view it is nothing short of a national scandal that the production of pigs is not very much more in evidence than it is. Actually, there are only about 1,000,000 pigs in the country, and that figure has been stable for many years. There are about 400,000 holdings in the country, every one of which could keep half a dozen or more pigs on the average if they set about doing so. Actually 400,000 holdings keeping 1,000,000 pigs averages only about 2½ pigs per holding, and, looked at from that point of view, there is room for considerable expansion in the total pig population, and in the average number of pigs kept per holding. Similarly with regard to poultry, we have about 20,000,000 in the country, and 400,000 holdings, which implies an average poultry stock of about 50 per holding. That is very little more than the number of poultry which could be maintained by the off-scourings of the dinner table and the farmyard. If we were serious about our agricultural development, we would long ere this have raised our poultry population to something like an average of 100 per holding instead of 50 per holding. Again, with regard to cows we have about 1,200,000 cows, which when divided by the number of agricultural holdings gives an average of only three cows per holding. If we were serious about the business of dairy production we should have a far higher average than three cows per holding.
The aspect of our agriculture that most strikes the townsman is the comparatively small proportion of tillage in which we normally indulge. At the moment our corn, root and green crops add up to about 1,500,000 acres. Our hay crop, both rotation grasses and permanent meadow, adds up to about 2,000,000 acres, and there are about 8,000,000 acres of permanent pasture. If we increase tillage, and I think we should, we must diminish the area under grass. In doing so, we should take care to plough up only that grass which is most inferior as grass, and which, therefore, will give the greatest increase on balance by the sacrifice of grass in favour of a tillage crop. People do not adequately realise the extraordinary proportion of our total output of food which is derived directly from grass. The scientists have devised a formula for expressing a common measure of the volume of food output. They talk about starch pounds, or starch tons or starch equivalent. In one of our most valuable official statistical publications, we have an account of the yield in terms of starch pounds or tons of our various food crops in a series of years ending in 1926. It appeared that in 1926 the aggregate value of the starch equivalent of hay, corn and root crops was 2,500,000 tons. In that year there were 8,000,000 acres under pasture, and according to Dr. Kennedy, whose authority in this connection is very much respected, we may assume that the starch equivalent per acre of good grass land is in the neighbourhood of 1,400 pounds, or more than half a ton. Taking it at half a ton or less, it would appear that in 1926 we derived from grass a starch equivalent of 4,000,000 tons, whereas we obtained from hay, corn and roots put together only 2,500,000 tons. In the ordinary functioning of our economy, therefore, we derive twice as much food value from our pasture lands as we do from the lands which we cultivate with the plough. That, of course, is no reason why we should not plough up inferior pasture under present conditions, but it is a reason why we should take care not to plough up pasture land of such a kind that we may perhaps destroy more food value by ploughing up that pasture than we create by putting it in oats or barley.
Another aspect of the problem of increasing food production is the availability of labour supply. As things are at present, the number of agricultural labourers in employment is about 120,000. The number who are out of work, or who have drifted into the towns, or who are working on the roads is not known to me, but at all events it constitutes a substantial reserve of agricultural labour, which by a suitable policy could be switched back again to agricultural production, so that as far as available labour is concerned there is no reason why agricultural production should not be rapidly extended. In this connection I would remind you that in 1914 to 1918 there were some 200,000 Irishmen, many of them belonging to the agricultural labouring class, who were by no means neutral in that Great War, and were not available for agricultural production. Yet, as I will show presently, in spite of that scarcity of man power in those years our agriculture made a tremendous effort, and did considerably extend the area under cultivation and the total production of food in terms of starch equivalent.
In our policy with reference to this great war, we should bear in mind the lessons that are available from the last great war, and one of those is that a firm, clearly defined national policy is desirable in the very beginning of the war. In the case of the last great war, some two years elapsed before Government policy became active in the direction of a policy of increasing agricultural production. In the first two years of that war the rise of prices was only a moderate one. Here are the figures: Based on 1911-13 as the standard year, the index number of agricultural prices in 1914 was 105.1; in 1915 it was 131.7; in 1916 it was 154.8; in 1917 it jumped to 202.0, and in 1918 it was 228.8, so that the farmers, responding only to the stimulus of price, did not apparently over-exert themselves in the first two years, but when the price factor became obviously favourable they did exert themselves very considerably. The volume of our agricultural effort in 1917 and 1918 was very respectable, and made a valuable contribution to the final success of the allies in that great war. The figures for our total output, in terms of starch pounds of hay, corn and roots were 2,500,000 tons in 1913. They fell in 1914 to 2,200,000. They rose in 1915 to practically 2,500,000. They fell again in 1916, but in 1917 and 1918 they rose, and in 1918 reached a maximum figure of 2,700,000. So that, there was a substantial agricultural effort in those years, and these were some of the results.
Now, tillage increased enormously in those years, but—and this is the point that I should like to emphasise—that increase of tillage was mainly an increase of cereal production. The cereal production increased from a total of about 900,000 acres, in 1913, to a maximum of 1,456,000 acres in 1918. The cultivation of root crops increased by only about 100,000 acres, whereas cereal cultivation increased by some 500,000 acres. Now, in those years there was a difficulty in connection with the import of artificial manures, and feeding-stuffs were scarce. Nevertheless, we had to carry on and do the best we could under the difficult circumstances of the time. The figures for the import of Indian meal might be put on record for the convenience of people who may be reading the Official Debates. In 1913, we imported—I am referring now to the figures for all Ireland, because these figures related to all Ireland at that time—14,880,000 cwts. of maize. In 1914 that figure was just over 13,000,000 cwts. In 1915 it was 13,700,000 cwts. In 1916 it was 10,200,000 cwts. In 1917 it was 7,400,000 cwts., and in 1918 it was about 2,250,000 cwts.—a terrific drop took place in 1918.
Similarly, with regard to the import of phosphate rock, the figure in 1914 was 117,000 tons, but it fell to 62,500 tons in 1917, rose again to 107,000 tons in 1918, and so on. In other words, in spite of the terrific expansion in tillage, it was impossible to get an equal expansion in agricultural manures and in imported feeding-stuffs for our cattle. The effect of all that on our agricultural fertility was injurious in the long run because, as every farmer knows, the more you can feed your live stock on imported concentrates the more you will be able to improve the fertility of your soil, by the effect of the increase in manurial value when, in one form or another, it reaches your land again, whether pasture land or tillage land. So that, to be able to import feeding-stuffs from abroad is, indirectly, a way of feeding the land and keeping it in a good condition. Therefore, we must be on our guard, as far as possible, against the tendency towards a diminution in the fertility of the soil that may result in that lack of imported concentrates. However, in my view, the chief cause of the decline in productivity, after the last war, was the unbalanced increase in corn crops, and the impossibility of increasing the acreage under roots in order to keep step with the acreage under corn crops. Root crops only increased by 100,000 acres, whereas cereal crops increased by 500,000 acres, and therefore there was a scarcity of manure for the land, with a consequent impoverishment of the land, and our agriculture had to pay for that during the years following the war.