Steel in Plenty

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25924, 3 October 1949, Page 6

Steel in Plenty

In finding that the post-war steel famine is over, the “ Daily Express ” has made no startling discovery. Many months ago the steel committee of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, fearing that the Western European countries had set too high an output target for their four-year plan of industrial development, set itself to study whether it might be advisable to spread over seven years instead of four the expansion programme designed to raise production from a pre-war average of 44.46 million ingot tons to 57.56 million ingot tons a year. The United States Economic Co-operation Administration reported in April that, with the assent of most of the O.E.E.C. representatives, it had recommended spreading the programme over eight to 10 years. “so as to permit a “ more accurate appraisal to be “ made of potential markets ”. The latest bulletin of the Statistical Office of the United Nations shows the striking progress of the chief steelproducing countries of Western Europe. The average monthly production of the United Kingdom last year was 1.240.000 metric tons, compared with 1.001.000 in 1945 and 1.032,000 in the immediate pre-war years; by May of this year production had risen to 1.284.000 tons. Last year France returned virtually to its pre-war production level of 603.000 tons a month; and for the first five months of this year the average output was 767,000 tons. Production in Belgium and Luxembourg has risen in three years from 169.000 metric tons a month to 530.000 tons—a considerable advance on the pre-war average of 412.000. In the same period Western German production has risen from 237.000 to 565.000 tons a month; and the March output of 939,000 tons rose well up towards the pre-war German production level of 1.200,000 to 1,456,000 metric tons a month. It is not surprising that the steel interests in these countries have begun to wonder whether they are travelling too far too quickly. The report from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, mentioned in recent cable news, shows that their concern is justified. Fewer orders have caused some steel furnaces—in Belgium and Luxembourg, it is believed—to be closed. Unfortunately the steelcommittee of the O.E.E.C. has so far been ineffective in co-ordinating the development of the industry in Europe. The “ Statistical Bulletin ” of the British Iron and Steel Federation remarked recently that while the committee’s present investigations may help to determine the overall production level which may safely be aimed at within a period, the committee is not likely to be able to do something much more difficult and more important—that is, decide where the steel is to be made and which plants are to be modernised or replaced. If Europe cannot co-operate on this issue, its co-operation will not amount to much. Steel in plenty is a heartening prospect for a world which has been starved of steel for many years now; but idle plants,

unemployment, and the waste of human and material resources would be a heavy price to pay, and the whole world would have lo pay it.