: Our estimate for the Specialist wing is as follows: Add 12 per cent. in respect of Cost of Passages, Add 25 per cent. in respect of Provident Fund contributions, say £6,300 ... £3,150 Total ... £34,750 £35,000 The estimate for the Service, therefore, amounts to: To this should be added our previous estimates for the Advisory Council, and for the staff of one Central Research Station, amounting to £14,000 and £20,000 respectively, making a grand total of £127,000. On this basis the contributions from the Empire Marketing Board will amount to £7,000 under paragraph 2 (a) of the formula set out above, and to £9,300 under paragraph 2 (b). The proposed cess of 1/400th on Colonial revenues will yield approximately £120,000 and the total initial income of the Central Fund will therefore be £136,300. We are thus leaving a balance of £9,300 for contingencies generally, in addition to the separate provision of £1,000 for contingencies in our estimate for the Advisory Council. 78. We contemplate that it will be necessary for the Advisory Council and the Agricultural Committee to be established for some little time before the Colonial Agricultural Service can be inaugurated, and we have therefore considered what arrangements should be made to meet the cost of the Council during this interim period. As already stated, the total amount required for the Council during the initial stages is approximately £14,000, of which * See footnote on previous page. the Empire Marketing Board will subscribe £7,000. We have considered on what basis the Colonies should be invited to contribute the remaining £7,000 and, taking as a rough guide the Colonial contributions towards the maintenance of the Imperial Bureau of Entomology, recommend that the Colonial Governments concerned should be invited to make the following annual contributions, which would, of course, be absorbed when the proposed cess comes into operation : 79. The Advisory Council will, of course, be mainly concerned with questions of policy and it is obviously undesirable that they should be burdened with accounting work in respect of the Colonial Agricultural Service. We recommend that the Crown Agents for the Colonies, who already perform somewhat similar functions for, e.g., the Imperial Bureaux of Entomology and Mycology, should be requested to undertake this work and should be responsible for keeping the Central Fund accounts. We see no reason why the general administration of the Fund should present any difficulty. In practice the salaries of officers in the Colonial Agricultural Service will no doubt be paid in the first instance by the Colonial Government concerned, and the necessary adjustments could be made either by the Crown Agents transferring the amount in question from the Central Fund to the Government's account with them or perhaps by the Government deducting that amount from the contribution under the cess which they will instruct the Crown Agents to pay into the Fund on their behalf. A similar procedure could be adopted as regards the cost of officers' passages and as regards any other expenditure which might be incurred on behalf of an officer in the Service while he was serving abroad. VI. CONCLUSION. 80. In this Report we have refrained both from emphasising the advantages of the scheme and from dwelling on the prospects of future progress which it offers. Throughout our inquiries, however, we have been conscious of the vast possibilities of agricultural development in the Colonial Empire, towards which the creation of a single Agricultural Service is an important step. The welfare and progress of agriculture is to-day the most vital concern of almost every Colonial Administration. The prosperity of the people, the trade, and, not least, the revenue of each Colony is mainly dependent upon its agricultural production. Agriculture, in fact, may be said to be the main industry of the Colonial Empire, and on the efficiency of agriculture depends therefore not only the food supply of the population, but, indeed, all economic and social progress. Science does not stand still, and the country which lags behind in the application of the latest scientific knowledge to the practice of agriculture must suffer a loss which cannot be estimated. The failure to provide for efficient and up-to-date agricultural research may mean not merely serious annual losses on crops but indeed the loss of a whole industry to a country or group of countries: on the other hand, the provision of such research may mean the gain to a country of a new industry or at any rate the retention of an industry which would otherwise be lost. Such are the large issues at stake. The figures which were given in the two previous Reports, and to which we have already referred, show the great expansion in Colonial trade which has taken place during the present century. That expansion still continues, and in 1926 the total trade of the Colonies with which we are here concerned, which amounted in 1906 to £157,000,000, had grown to £485,000,000. Rapid and striking as this development has been, we are as yet only witnessing its infancy. As we have already shown the trade of the Colonies depends at present on the agricultural activities of 50,000,000 people, a number which is small in proportion to the territory they inhabit, and its full development is still to come. 81. The proper organisation of the agricultural resources of the Colonial Empire must always depend first and foremost on the supply of properly trained and qualified staff. It is our considered opinion that the creation of the Colonial Agricultural Service will in itself put recruiting on an entirely new basis. The Service will offer a wide and varied career, which will afford its members the opportunity of doing the best work within their power and of receiving full recognition for that work, while, on the financial side, the scales of salary which we have recommended, and which approximate to those paid to scientific officers in private employment, should not fail to attract the ablest recruits. We have deliberately included a class with a maximum salary of £3,000, although, as we have already stated, we do not contemplate that officers should be promoted to this class until their own qualifications and the importance of their work justify such a course. But we are confident that it will be found possible, and indeed necessary, to appoint more and more officers to this class as agriculture develops in the Colonies, and we see no reason why the ambitious recruit of to-day should not hope to be the Class I officer of twenty or thirty years hence. 82. Nor will the benefits of this scheme be confined to either the richer or the poorer Colonies. It is to the former that the best men will eventually gravitate, as they will find there the highest paid appointments; and those Colonies will benefit by securing the services of the most highly qualified officers who will, in addition, have had considerably wider experience than it is generally possible for them to acquire under present conditions. On the other hand, the smaller Colonies will gain by having as their Directors of Agriculture picked officers in the unified Service on their way up to the highest posts, who will not, as so easily may happen to-day, lose touch with the progress of agricultural practice and science and, if we may use the word, stagnate, without hope of promotion or of recognition. These Colonies will also benefit from the special investigations or missions which they cannot at present afford and which will in future be provided for them, if necessary, from the Central Fund. 83. All Colonies will benefit alike from the general aperçu of the agricultural situation as a whole which the Advisory Council will be qualified to give. The Council will be able to draw fully upon all sources of information, such as Imperial Bureaux or Correspondence Centres at home, Central Research Stations abroad, or the published results of investigations in foreign countries such as those of the Department of Agriculture in the United States of America or the Research Stations in the Dutch East Indies. Their knowledge will be world-wide, and the advice based on that knowledge which they will be able to give to the Secretary of State and to Colonial Governments will be such as no other body which exists to-day can equal. 84. This brings us to a further point. From our own discussions and from those which we have had with your Veterinary Committee, two important principles of organisation have emerged-the need for promoting free and well-directed cooperation between the different scientific Services when a problem of common interest is to be solved, and the need for giving each Service its proper status and prestige. We believe that the former can best be secured, first, by providing machinery for coordinating effort and exchanging information on the lines of the Advisory Council which we have recommended for the Agricultural and Veterinary Services, and, secondly, by making the training and conditions of service approximately similar in each Service, so that they may regard each other as members of a common scientific corps. We consider that the status and prestige of individual Services can, in the main, best be fostered by two provisions. In the first place, the Secretary of State should have professional advice with regard to each of them available in this country, whether in the form of an individual Adviser or a Council, or, as in the case of agriculture, of both. Secondly, each Service should, in any Colony where its importance justified such a course, be placed under its own professional head, who should act as its spokesman. 85. We would wish, in conclusion, to repeat once more that the scheme which we have recommended is not meant either to stereotype the lines of future development or to limit in any way the efforts of individual Colonies. We would strongly object also to any suggestion that the officers in the unified Service should be placed under a central authority. We do not contemplate that the Council should exercise executive control in any way whatever, and it is essential that in his own Colony each Governor should retain unimpaired his authority over the members of the Service, who will, of course, be subject to the local disciplinary and other regulations. Nor do we suggest that the Council should themselves communicate with Colonial Governments on questions of policy or general administration : it may indeed be convenient for individual members of the Council to communicate direct with officers in the Service overseas on technical questions not involving policy in connection with any particular work on research, but even then it is important that copies of the communications should be sent, if only for information, to the Director of Agriculture concerned. 86. We do not deny that difficulties may be found in initiating the organisation which we have recommended, and it would be unduly optimistic to hope that in the first instance the scheme will be found to be invariably fair in its incidence. But we are confident that in considering our proposals Colonial Governments will have regard not only to their own individual needs and interests but also to those of the Colonial Empire as a whole. The Colonies have before them great opportunities of making a real contribution to agricultural knowledge and science, and if full advantage is to be taken of these opportunities it is essential that they should act together and join in a great cooperative effort. The Colonial Empire is a unity in itself, and we claim that in the field of Agriculture that unity can best be shown through the scheme of organisation which was approved in principle by the Colonial Office Conference and which has been set out in detail in this Report. |