Land Rights

S.I. Planters Want Better Land Rights

From Our Own Correspondent.

Tulagi, June 14.

THOUGH the question of how best to assist planters comes up in successive meetings of the S.I. Advisory Council, ideas seem to centre round copra driers.

Perhaps if a better title to land were given, so that planters would know next year that the land occupied would re main theirs, there would be no difficulty about inducing them to put money and work into driers and other improvements.

As mentioned time after time in the “P.I.M.”, small planters have been unable to carry on. If the land they are on were their own, they could live there in bad times, as they did for the greater part of the depression. But with the feeling that they can be evicted at any time, what incentive to effort and sacrifice is there?

The cancelled leases in the Native Lease section are incredible. The situation with regard to Crown leases is a good deal better, because the Administration has made rental concessions which, for some reason, they felt they could not do in the case of native leases.

If the Administration can induce Fiji and the Colonial Office to consider sen sibly the question of those leaseholds, they will be doing more good than by subsidising the erection of driers that really do not seem very effective.

Rev. Father E. Meyer, senior priest at the Roman Catholic mission at Apia, Western Samoa, arrived in Sydney by the Monterey on July 15, on several months’ furlough.