Sundry Items
There are many ways of assisting the agricultural industry not pertinent to this discussion on the cost of distribution. They do demand inquiry, and public illumination; most of them do not demand legislation so much as public education and consideration when legislating on other subjects. Our agricultural interests also need a foreign policy. For instance, during the last month there has been a consolidation of control of buying in world
markets by the European Governments. How far it may be extended in its policies is not clear. Nevertheless, a combination of importers in all Europe under government control could determine the prices on every farm in the United States.
The Margin Between the Wholesaler and Consumer
As the datum point of price determination is the wholesaler's market, the accretions of charge for distribution from that point forward, the economy of extravagance in these costs, is of primary interest to the consumer. The same phenomena of marking up goods on the shelf, calculating profits not on commodities but on dollars handled, a minor amount of vicious speculation, and the passing on of excess profits tax, are present in those trades during the past years. A much more pertinent phenomenon in unduly increasing their margins is the increasing demands of the consumer as to service. Several deliveries daily, purchases on credit, the abandonment of the market basket in favor of the telephone, mean many costs. One of them much overlooked is that customers must always have "first" quality when they buy over the telephone, and the sec
onds and thirds of equal food value in many commodities go to waste and are added to the price of the firsts. That there are some people in the United States who want to buy sanely is evidenced by the 400 per cent increase in "cash and carry" shops. There are also too many people in the final stages of distribution. One city in the United States has one meat retailer for every 400 inhabitants; it would be equally well served with one dealer for every 1200. The result is high margin to the retailers and no out-of-the-way income to any of them. There is no very immediate remedy for this. One possibility is an extension of coöperative buying by consumers. It has proved a great success abroad. It is not socialism, for it arises from voluntary action and initiative among the people themselves.
Ill Balance of Agriculture and General Industry
There is now a tendency to ill balance between the agricultural and general industry. For many years we were large exporters of food and importers of manufactured goods. We gradually imported mouths, manufactured our own goods and just as rapidly diminished our food exports. Up to the point where we
consumed our own food and manufactured our own goods it has been a great national development. Our annual exports of food decreased during the past twenty-five years from some 15,000,000 tons to about 6,000,000 just before the European War. In the meantime we increased the import of such commodities as sugar, rice, vegetable oils, until our net exports were about 5,000,000 tons. Of the kinds of food exported this probably represents a decreased export of from twenty-five or thirty per cent of our production down to five per cent of it.
During the war we gave special stimulus to food production and produced greater economies in consumption so that these later years somewhat befog the real current, for our agricultural surplus in normal years is really very small. During the war and since, we have given great stimulus to our manufacturing industries. If we shall continue to build up our manufacturing industries and our export trade without corresponding encouragement to agriculture, we will soon have more mouths in our country than we can feed on our own produce. We shall, like the European States which have devoted themselves to industrial development, ultimately become dependent upon overseas food supplies. If we examine their situation