The Press Tuesday, January 18, 1927. Sheltered and Unsheltered Industries.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18902, 18 January 1927, Page 6

The Press Tuesday, January 18, 1927. Sheltered and Unsheltered Industries.

The latebt Bulletin (No. 24; issued by the Economics Committee of the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce contains a good deal of matter that has already been presented. It was pointed out two or three months ago by the Committee that the primary industries .since the beginning of the century have .supplied nearly three-quarters of the Dominion's total production, but that within the primary industries group itself there has been a sharp decline during the last twenty'five years in the proportion contributed by agriculture, mines, forests, and fisheries, a slight decline in the output of the pastoral industry, and a remarkable increase (fortunately for everybody) :n th-5 3hftre contributed by dairying. It has not, however, been so definitely indicated before that of the total amount produced in the Dominion by all industries (something over one hundred million pounds' worth), more than half goes abroad to meet competition in tho open markets of the world and less than one-eighth is exposed to foreign competition at home. It would naturally be supposed by a stranger who first examined our tariff schedules that the agricultural, pastoral, and dairying industries are of comparatively little importance in the Dominion and that our main effort as a people is devoted to the production of manufactured goods. Actually the facts are more, incongruous than the Committee's figures indicate, since the fifty-eight million pounds' worth of goods which we sell in unsheltered markets (55 per cent, of our total production) have to bear transport costs to- those markets and all the risks, anxieties, and disappointments involved in sending goods to be sold on the other side of the world. The attempt of the Bulletin to group the products of secondary industries according to the market conditions under which they are sold is perhaps a little daring with the information available; but it is very interesting, and of great practical importance even if the figures are found under closer examination to be in need of correction or modification. Besides, whatever value Ave attach to these figures, we can hardly question the Bulletin's conclusion that the "chief " economic difficulties of the Dominion " in the post-war period are traceable "to the disparity between prices and " costs thrbughout these groups of industries." It is common knbwlqdge that the industries in the sheltered groups still receive very much higher prices, relatively, than the unsheltered industries—occasionally as high again. There are, for example, sheltered industries whoBG product still sells at twice the pre-war level, though 50 per cent, above the pre-war level is as much, on the average, as the products in the unsheltered group now command. And it is of course the prices received in the sheltered industries which determine the costs in the unsheltered group, and leave industries here, in so many cases, unable to meet expenses out of returns. Those who do not realise what it means to a country to protect its secondary industries at the expense of its primary, or do not realise what it means when it happens at home, will perhaps begin to think when they read the remarks to-day of the secretary of the New Zealand Employers' Federation on his return from a visit to the United States. We have not yet gone so far in New Zealand in preference to one class of the community as they have in the "United States; but it is not the fault of that class that we have not, and it is not their appreciation of the appalling danger of going further that is the most hopeful sign for the farmer for the future.