COMMERCIAL INDUSTRIAL ITEMS.

Press, Volume LV, Issue 10215, 10 December 1898, Page 7

COMMERCIAL INDUSTRIAL ITEMS.

ARGENTINE WHEAT HARVEST. Argentina this 'harvest—it is now in full swing—calculates upon an exportable surplus of to the extent of 1,800,000 tons, or 68£ million bushels. How great a quantity that is, says- the Sydney "Daily Telegraph," may be judged from the fact that the entire wheat crop of Australasia last year was under 34 million bushels, or not half the present exportable surplus of Argentina. This year Australasia will do better, as it looks like a wheat crop of 43 million bushels. But. the total . Argentine crop must well exceed * 100. million-, and is probably two and a half times that of all these seven colonies put together. In Australasia the exportable surplus may reach 10 million bushels, but Argentina counts upon nearly seven times as much. Yet the wheat exports of our great South American rival are almost entirely a matter of the past few years. We here boast of having brought much new land under cultivation recently, but there the cultivation has extended at an almost fabulous rate; and they are exporting maize largely, as well as wheat. But then, in Argentina, agricultural land :s so much cheaper and more easily acquired. They have their pests in the shape of droughts and locusts, but nine years back Australasia was the larger exporter of wheat, and the change since then >as certainly been a remarkable one. How >£ will it be before Australasia will be in ,i position to look for a 100-million-bushel wheat crop? The Argentine exportable surplus this year must be worth over £10,000,000. TRANSVAAL FINANCES. Government revenues in the Transvaal just now are the very reverse of elastic. The Customs, which yielded £666,594 in the first half of 1897, gave only £600,247 in the first half of this year, while mining prospectors' licenses between the same periods fell from £237,682 to £177,437. The general imports, which amounted in value to £7,279,469 for the first six months of 1897, fell to £5,193,219 for the same period- in 1898, or a decrease of about 28 per cent., being £2,086.250 for the half year. The value of goods carried in transit through Cape Colony is given for the half-year ending June 30th, 1898, as £1,564.600. as against £2,319,671 for the corresponding period of 1897 ; those carried through Natal as £882,992, as against £1,267,585; through Delagoa Bay as. £888,271, as against £1,366,506, making a total decline in transit trade from abroad of £1,617,899, or ' at the rote of about 33 per cent. No wonder President Kruger has been looking round for additional sources of taxation. TRADE OF FRANCE. The trade of France with all her colonies in 1897 was officially valued at -350,300,000, the imports being placed at £-5,972,000, and the exports at £14,328,000. Apart from Algeria and Tunis, which are just across the Mediterranean, the total was represented by £5,316,000 imports and £4,704,000 exports. In the same year the British imports from British colonies amounted to £93,92/,000, and the British exports to her cokmies to £86,705,000, so 'that, roughly, the British colonial trade was nearly six tiroes *« great as the French, and

England places none of those restrictions upon trading with other countries, which the French invariably do. The trade of Prance with British colonies is certainly larger than with her own, while the British trade with French colonies is confined to about £5,000,000 annually, and only about J one-half of that is taken direct from and to British porta, the remainder having to be transhipped at French ports to avoid surcharges. Still, the French colonies will have , British cotton goods, in spite of restrictions.