Apples and Meat

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23743, 15 September 1942, Page 4

Apples and Meat

Over the week-end the Internal Division of the Marketing Department has again increased the price of apples by 2s 6d or 3s a case, the reason suggested in a report on Saturday being that the cfepartment now wishes to discourage sales in order to make stocks last till the new season’s fruit is on the market. Whether this is the reason or not, it is to be hoped that members of Parliament will 'take the first opportunity to bring the department’s policy and methods under searching review. Critical investigation should be pushed much further than before. If the department is now so short of apples that prices must be raised to check consumption, it should be reminded of the reason it gave for refusing to allow excellent windfalls to be marketed even for a limited pei’iod, after the heavy storm last autumn. The reason was that the sale of these apples would injure that of graded apples. The department was under contract to buy all these; the limits of consumption had been reached and tested by every possible device;- and if the windfalls were sold, grade apples would be left on hand. In other words, the department was afraid of being overstocked, and of losing that way. In fact, if the Wellington report is correct, it is understocked, and is certainly not going tc lose by it. But the public lost before, and the public is going to lose again. Suppose, on the other hand, that the department has plenty of apples still. If so, then the price advance is a seasonal one, which (it will be argued) is due to the accumulated costs of holding fruit in store. There are questions to be asked: How far does this justification really go? How much further is it stretched by mere departmental commercialism? Has it yet been stretched far enough to make the Government begin to wonder where the national interest comes intp monopoly control by the of a food like fruit?, )

These questions should be answered before the department again seizes the opportunity, as it did last year, to charge an extortioner’s price and profit on early apples. And after apples, lemons. The Acting-Prime Minister’s statement on the urgent need to stabilise wages and prices effectively was a timely one. It was not, in a narrower sense, well-timed, falling as it did in a week when the public has been told it must pay more for fruit and more for meat. It very well be true that the New Zealand diet contains too much meat; but the policy which has just permitted a sham seasonal rise in retail prices, over levels generally 5 per cent, above 1939, is not intended to correct this fault. It is intended solely to adjust retail to wholesale prices; and the effect is felt much more severely in the low wage-earner’s budget than anywhere else. That is, it is felt most severely where it should be felt least, and by a class whose support for wage-price stabilisation it is essential to secure. To say this is not to say that the increase in meat prices, on the facts and according to the regulative procedure, is unwarrantable. It is, however, to say that the Government cannot afford to preach price-stabilisation without bringing its practice squarely into line.