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AGRICULTURAL TRIBUNAL OF INVESTIGATION.

FINAL REPORT.

MINUTE OF APPOINTMENT.

I hereby appoint

Sir WILLIAM J. ASHLEY

Professor W. G. S. ADAMS, and

Professor D. H. MACGREGOR

as a Tribunal of Investigation to enquire into the methods which have been adopted in other countries during the last fifty years to increase the prosperity of agriculture and to secure the fullest possible use of the land for the production of food and the employment of labour at a living wage, and to advise as to the methods by which those results can be achieved in this country. And I further appoint Mr. C. S. Orwin as Agricultural Assessor to the said Tribunal and Mr. D. B. Toye, of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, as Secretary of the said Tribunal.

29th December, 1922.

(Signed) A. BONAR LAW.

Note. The total expenses incurred by the Tribunal, excluding the cost of printing and publication of the Interim and Final Reports, amount to 954/. 10s. 10d. The estimated cost of printing and publication of this Report is approximately 3647.

To the Right Honourable J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P., Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

SIR,

In submitting for your consideration our Final Reports, we wish to state that, while on some matters they represent different points of view, they should also be regarded largely as supplementary one to the other, each Report treating certain aspects of the problem more fully than the other. Each member of the Tribunal is, of course, responsible only for the Report to which his signature is appended.

We have to express our obligations to the many witnesses who appeared before us or sent written information. Particularly do we desire to thank the Foreign Office for reports supplied by British representatives abroad; the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, and especially their Statistical Branch, who prepared much valuable material for our use, and the International Labour Office at Geneva. Our thanks are due also to Mr. Harald Faber, Danish Agricultural Commissioner in London, who gave us assistance with regard to Denmark; and to Sir Horace Plunkett, who furnished most useful material relative to agricultural developments in the United States.

We desire to record our high appreciation of the unsparing and most valuable services of our Secretary, Mr. D. B. Toye, throughout the inquiry and in the drafting of the Interim and Final Reports.

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Report of Sir William Ashley and Professor W. G. S. Adams.

To the Rt. Hon. J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P., Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

SIR,

1. In our Interim Reports of 29th March and 10th November 1923 we stated, in view of the urgency of the situation, various steps which, in our opinion, could be taken with a view to the immediate assistance of agriculture. We left over for subsequent consideration those matters which were more of the nature of long period causes, as well as any general observations on the place of agriculture in national life and the comparison between the position of agriculture in this and in other countries.

2. We propose, therefore, in this Final Report to submit certain considerations with regard to

(1) The place of agriculture in national life;

(2) The comparison of British and Foreign agriculture; and

(3) The chief methods adopted by other countries with a view to the assistance of agriculture and their value in relation to British agriculture.

3. Before proceeding to consider these main aspects of the question, we desire to make certain preliminary observations. First, owing to the wide scope of our Terms of Reference, it has not been possible to do more than endeavour to sift out, from the great variety of material, such evidence as was most relevant to the present enquiry. Despite the large and increasing number of reports, records, and statistical returns relating to the development of foreign and colonial agriculture, the data necessary to enable close comparisons are often lacking. We have endeavoured to form as just an estimate as we can from the available materials, recognising that further enquiries may elucidate much more adequately many of the points to which we direct attention.

4. Second, it is necessary to state our view as regards the value of comparisons with foreign or colonial agriculture. Great care must be taken in drawing conclusions from the methods adopted with success under different circumstances in other countries. Allowance must always be made for the general economic policy and the state of organisation in any country, and for widely divergent conditions in respect of such matters as density of population, tenure and distribution of land and proximity to markets; while still more subtle are considerations of a social character, such as habits of training and association, and the influence of Church and State in directing the lives of the

people. There are, therefore, serious limiting conditions for which allowance must always be made in considering the application of methods suited in one country to the practice which obtains in another.

5. Nevertheless, the comparative study of agricultural development has a two-fold value, first, in so far as it suggests methods of individual and associated action which contribute to the efficiency of agriculture, and second, in so far as it enables a juster appreciation to be formed of the progress of agriculture in other countries and of their strength as competitors in world production. In this latter connection the subjects which particularly deserve much more systematic analysis than they have received in this country are the changes in the output of different countries and their costs of production. Especially in a country which offers an open market for the produce of the world, constant attention should be directed to the growth of competing supplies and to costs of production in other countries. Up to the present, reliable data as regards costs of production are extremely hard to obtain. Even in this country data are very imperfect as to the range and average of farming costs. In a few foreign countries very considerable efforts have been made to collect data on costs, but comparability between country and country is still very difficult to secure. With the steady growth, however, of carefully compiled evidence, capable of comparison, a much more definite study will be possible as to the future prospects of the different sides of the agricultural industry. The subject is so important that we direct attention at the outset to this question, as it affects the validity of any comparative enquiry at the present time.

6. We, therefore, wish to affirm, that while we are satisfied as to the value of pursuing enquiries into methods adopted by other countries and of studying the growth of their economic organisation for production and marketing, the main guidance in the development of our agricultural policy must be derived from the careful analysis of our own conditions, the comparison of methods actually practised in this country, the collection of data by which the value of different methods can be determined with accuracy sufficient for practical purposes, and the consideration of ways and means by which the uneconomic elements in our agricultural system can be eliminated. The study of agriculture in other countries and the analysis of the position at home are complementary, but the more important of the two matters is, in our opinion, the thorough analysis of the position in this country. We consider that, however imperfect the present survey may be, there is a strong case for steady systematic investigation into this large comparative field.

7. There is a further general observation. We desire to make clear the relationship between the Interim Reports and this Final Report. Our Terms of Reference request us to consider how far

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