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Show MARKETING WORLD'S ' GREATEST PROBLEM WE ARE LONG ON PRODUCTION, SHORT ON DISTRIBUTION. By Peter Radford Lecturer National Farmers' Union. The economic distribution of farm products is today the world's greatest problem and the war, while it has brought Its hardships, has clearly emphasized em-phasized the importance of distribution distribu-tion as a factor in American agriculture agricul-ture and promises to give the farmers farm-ers the co-operation of the government govern-ment and the business men the solution of their marketing problem. This result will, in a measure, compensate com-pensate us for our war losses, for the business interests and government have been in the main assisting almost al-most exclusively on the production side of agriculture. While the department depart-ment of agriculture has been dumping tons of literature on the farmer telling him how to produce, the farmer has been dumping tons of products in the nation's garbage can for want of a market. The. World Will Never Starve. At no time since Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden have the inhabitants of this world suffered from lack of production, but some people have gone hungry from the day of creation to this good hour for the lack of proper distribution. Slight variations in production have forced a change in diet and one locality local-ity has felt the pinch of want; while another surfeited, but the world as a whole has ever been a land of plenty. We now have less than one-tenth of the tillable land of the earth s surface under cultivation, and we not only have this surplus area to draw on but it is safe to estimate that in case, of dire' necessity one-half the earth's population could at the present time knock their living out of the trees of the forest, gather it from wild vines and draw it from streams. No one should become alarmed; the world will never starve. The consumer has always feared that the producer would not supply him and his fright has found expression expres-sion on the statute books of our states and nations and the farmer has been urged to produce recklessly and without with-out reference to a market, and regardless regard-less of the demands of the consumer. Back to the Soil. The city people have been urging each other to move back to the farm, but very few of them have moved. We welcome out city cousins back to the soil and this earth's surface con-! tains 16,092,160,000 idle acres of tillable till-able land where they can make a living by tickling the earth with a. forked stick, but we do not need them so far as increasing production Is concerned; con-cerned; we now have all the producers, we can use. The city man has very-erroneous very-erroneous ideas of agricultural conditions. condi-tions. The commonly accepted theory that we are short on production is all wrong. Our annual Increase In pro--ducty(i far exceeds that of our increase' in-crease' in population. The World as a Farm. Taking the world as one big farm, we find two billion acres of land In cultivation. Of this amount there is approximately 750,000,000 acres on the western and 1,260,000,000 acres on the eastern hemisphere, in cultivation. This estimate, of course, does not ir.'. (Continued on last page.) |