—

f

Gt tnt

Mi Tay SoA

Drouth, debt, devastation menace

A national farm policy on irrigation and electrifica-
tion will save the Canadian west and

help feed the world.

By Alfred C. Campbell

ROUTH—the terror of agriculture—threatens to pay its
periodic visit to the prairies. Its ghost left its calling
ecard this spring. It may return. Wind — like a blast from a
furnace. The iron blue sky pours down invisible molten lead

onto the land. The sun seems to have come to a standstill.

The land gasps with the oppressive heat and emits shim-
mering waves, sucking up the last remnants of moisture
and with it the hopes of the rural population. The soil splits

and yawns and fissures appear.

The stillness of death and op-
pressive- heat are broken only by
the monotonous whirr of hungry
grasshoppers. Water is scarce.
Im some localities homes, schools,
churches, stores and farms are
abandoned. Tractors are left
Standing in fields, monuments of
frustration. A money crisis sets in.
The circulation of commodities
ceases. Human suffering becomes
intense. ~

Tentacles of drouth
UGH was Saskatchewan in its
worst year—1937—when the ef

. facts of drouth spread its tent—

acles into Manitoba and Alberta.
And where this did not exist, rust
and its atendant evils laid its
brand upon the wheat crops. They
were years of agonized suffering.
They threaten once again their
periodic return to lay waste to
the small gains of western agri-
culture during the past war years.
This spring farmers anxiously
Scanned the skies wondering if it
would rain. It finally came but
mot enough. It might not come
next year. %

What emotions the farmers suf-
fered during the ‘Hungry Thir-
ties” every day for rain. To start
up in the night at the first crack
of thunder and flash of lighten-
ing; the black sky bellies down
as if to crush everything below;
an icy cold wind screams through
the farmyard carrying in its
wake, dirt, leaves and loose boards
from rotting buildings; an ironic
clatter of hail sounds on the roof;
the clouds pass over, darts of
lightning illuminating their path;
a mocking echo of thunder peals
in the distance—the rain falls else—
where.

Rain was needed, said the mon-

cpolist politicians, headed by
Federal Agriculture Minister
James G. Gardiner, as he an-

nounced a policy of building pid-
dling little water dugouts. “It is
an act of God,” said the mort-
gage, insurance and land corpora-
tions who farm the farmers and
never lost an interest payment.
“The west is robbing the east,”
eried Premiers Duplesis and Hep-
burn of Quebec and Ontario.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 10

The monopolies

UT the need of rain and relief

was only part of the story. The
west suffered chronic crisis be-
cause it had no reserves. The
monopolies with fixed industrial
prices, interest rates and mort-
gage payments sucked the last
cent from the old homestead. And
drouth, debt and monopoly con-
trol for ten years left scars on
the west from which it has not
fully recovered.

or is it true, as Donald Gordon
of the Wartime Prices and Trade
Board, and others, say that all
farmers are well off. The western
farmer in particular entered the
last war with depressed farm
prices while industrial prices
soared. When, as a result of mass
action in 1942, farm prices were
raised they still did not catch up
with the gap that has always ex-
isted between agricultural and in-
dustrial prices.

The huge amounts of uninvested
monies lying in the coffers of the
insurance, mortgage and land

companies bear witness the farm-

ers’ cash was channelled into
debt and mortgage payments.
They and Massey-Harris Com-

pany got it. The need for capital
investment in farm buildings and
machinery prove that. And should
drouth and its disastrous effects
hit the west this year and next
an agrarian crisis may set in
which will spread into the dairy
and cattle industry of the east
because of the lack of fodder. Em-
ployment of industrial and farm
implement workers will be cur-
tailed.

That situation combined with
the present wrong policies of the
federal government which shows
reluctance to extend agricultural
and industrial credits to countries
in need because they disagree
with their form of government,
will only intensify the crisis and
Already the
horsemen of hunger

curtail production.
four and
famine ride their wasted steeds
across

Europe, in India, and

=

China where millions die from
hunger. They need Canada’s
wheat, dairy and meat products.
Gardiner’s remarks on his return
from Europe that in no place did
he see the suffering the west wit-
nessed during the “thirties” is no
substitute for a policy that will
forever drive drouth from the
western plains and make it the
world’s granary it should be.

National policy

a national
irrigation,

ANADA needs
farm policy on
farm electrification, prices and
market and abolish the need
for large newspaper advertise—
ments sponsored by big baking
and flour milling monopolies ad-
vising people to eat less in order
that monopolies can garner
greater profits on the misery of
hungry people overseas. Already

they have advocated smaller
loaves and hinted increased
bread prices. That price in-

crease is on itS way now.

To trace the reason for these
events one must go back to a
speech delivered sometime ago
by Trade Minister MacKinnon
who, on returning from a trade
commission tour, said Canadians
must be more “austere” in their
living habits if Canada was to
win the markets of the world.
His mentor, James S. Duncan,
president of Massey-Harris Com-
pany, who recently received 2
farm implement price increase,
said the same thing sometime
ago.

Meanwhile, as the prairies
threaten to burn, Agricultural
Minister Gardiner fiddies a
well-known tune in the House
of Commons. The federal gov-
ernment hasn’t the funds to
carry out any extensive irriga-
tion programs. He had two
pieces of legislation to bring in
on irrigation but since the Do-
minion-provjncial conference had
no agreement on division of
taxation, insufficient funds were
available. He wants to play pol
ities with the results of the Do-
minion-provincial conference just
like George Drew.

Taik—no action
© there it is. Lots of talk,
but no action. During the last
severe douth- period Canadian
engineers estimated an irriga-
tion job could be done on the
prairies for around $450,006,000
which would banish drouth from
that area forever. Along with
this, power houses can be_ built
to extend rural electrification. It

Canada’s farm homes

Drouth, debt and monopoly control have left their scars on the
Canadian west. This is depicted in the famous painting (above)

entitled “‘Drouth’ by

Frederic Steiger,

one of Canada’s fore

most portrait painters, who formerly lived in Saslatooon, Sask

can be done, and was over large
areas of the Soviet Union. For-
mer arid areas now bloom with
crops and vegetables.

The amount of money needed
for irrigation is only a small
fraction of that raised for de
Struction in the past war. It
Can be raised again for such a
rational project. The prairies
are never safe from the threat

What they
the people

[* the whirr and gprind of
daily toil and chores, the
farmer, like the worker, tends

to forget an awful lot of things
he should remember. For in-
Stance he shouldn’t forget that
the trusts and monopolies who
are Skinning him now, are the
Same gang who have been do-
ing the skinning right along.
The organized packers; the pow-
erful grain, milling and baking
trusts, who rob the farmer ‘on
the hoof, and the people( in-
cliding the farmer) at the meal
table. The fruit, truck and root
crop trusts, who by the use of
a ‘grading’ standard, skin the
farmer at the point of produc-
tion, squeeze him again on the
railway platform, and through
their governments, hit him yet
again in the denial of parity
prices.

Tt is not so long ago since
these trusts and their political
spokesmen were telling the far-
mer not to grow food; were
‘subsidizing’ him for the grain
and potatoes and beef and pork
that he didn’t grow. If he-sold
an extra bag of potatoes in tHe
Fraser Valley, they haled him
before the magistrate, who read
him a lecture—not on food, but
on ‘law.’ Down in the south
farmers were subsidized for the
acreage of cotton they didn’t
srow, for the number of brood
cattle and swine they killed off;
for the tobacco they burned
rather than smoked. Oh, yes,

of prolonged drouth and its dey-
astation.
Not one farm conference or

convention held this summer,
can afford to leaye from the
agenda the problems of mar

kets, prices and particularly ir-
rigation. Already the shadow of
events to come are seen in the
sparse rainfall this spring. To
delay may be fatal.

wouldlike
to forget!

these are the same gentlemen
who now exhort farmers to grow
food to ‘save’ humanity. The
same gentlemen who use food as
a weapon to mould political
opinion, and bring into being
governments amenable to their
concept of a social system.

In the interim report of the
B.C. ‘Postwar Rehabilitation
Council’ (1943) one can find this
gem:

“There must be a  ¢loser
equation between the income,
and therefore the purchasing
power, of the agriculturalist
and the cost of his necessities.
This implies satisfactory prices

be established for his pro-
ducts.”
Implies? A nice word that.

The price boost the King gov-
ernment has given to the kings
of industry, to the plunderbund

of monopoly clearly indicates
that the “implication” is mean-
ingless and worthless, unless—

labor and -farmers get together;
sharpen up their memories, to
ask themselves the question —
can the gang who have impov-
erished, that they might use
poverty, who have created scar-
city, that they might use hun-
ser, who have conspired, and
are conspiring for war, as a
more profitable Source of divi-
dends than peace — can this
Sang be long allowed a _ ‘free
rein? The answer to this Simple
guestion can only be found in
action, generated from: the
mighty dynamo of labor-farmer
unity.

FRIDAY. JULY 19, 1946