252 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
At present British farmers, Empire farmers, and farmers from all over 
the world indulge in deadly competition in the British market. In the 
end they obtain wholly inadequate prices. But the community as a 
whole does not gain because they lose. The final cost of food to the 
consumer is profoundly affected by costs of handling, transport, prepara- 
tion and distribution, all expensive services. Better organisation of 
production, while benefiting the countryman, would not injure the rest 
of the community. 
Thanks to the inquiries made by the Ministry of Agriculture and the 
Empire Marketing Board, the food requirements of this country are pretty 
well known. Our next great step forward will be to organise production 
on a contract basis so as to satisfy these requirements with a reasonable 
margin of safety, but without the terrible waste involved in those large 
excesses which injure the grower without benefiting the consumer. 
Something of the sort is essential if farming is to survive as an occupa- 
tion for the best of our people, offering a reasonable standard of living to 
farmer and worker. The advantages would be incalculable. Organised 
production and the development of the contract system which has done 
so much for the milk producers, would permit of a renewal and development 
of country life to the fullest extent now made possible by scientific and 
technical advances. By commen consent many of the ills of to-day arise 
from the fact that for nearly a century the industrial side of our national 
life has been fostered at the expense of the rural side, producing an over- 
industrialised town population peculiarly susceptible to world economic 
disturbances, and now largely without employment or prospect of employ- 
ment. The rural population, on the other hand, is far less sensitive to 
economic disturbances ; the low rate of unemployment in the countryside 
shows the greater independence and resilience of the conditions of country 
life, and points clearly to the fact that improvements in our rural life would 
benefit not only the countryman but the whole community. 
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