Market Information and the Farmer's Problems

T HERE is no general agreement as to the cause of the agricultural depression since 1920, neither is there any unanimity of opinion concerning the remedies for the situation in which farmers have found themselves. Whether the farmer's plight arises wholly or in part from high handling costs resulting from the lag in wages in the post-war deflation period; or from an overproduction of farm commodities stimulated beyond the peace-time needs by the heavy demands of the war, and made possible by the tremendous technological developments in the last decade; or from a combination of circumstances in which each of these, and other alleged causes, are determinants, the fact remains that to the farmer, the real difficulty has been expressed in the form of low prices for products sold, and high prices for commodities purchased. Ask farmers themselves what the trouble is, and the answer invariably comes back Prices. What the farmer needs most is a higher purchasing power for the products he sells, regardless of how it is obtained. Either higher prices for products sold by producers, or lower prices for products purchased by them, will result in increasing the purchasing power of the farmer's dollar, and thus bring relief to the farming population. But what is the r6le of market information in such a farm relief program? Since the farmer's situation is reflected in the relative prices of farm products, it is evident that if the use of market information is to advance the

Business · Economics · Economy · Information market · Agricultural Economics and Policy

• The Making of Informational Efficiency

  Thomas Delcey, Guillaume Noblet•History of Political Economy•2024

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