PROCESSING OF POTATOES

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28606, 7 June 1958, Page 6

PROCESSING OF POTATOES

“Not An Economic Project”

While expert opinion at present was that it would not, be an economic project to establish a processing plant for potatoes in New Zealand, it was imperative in view of its policy of maintaining full production with the consequent risk of a surplus, that the board should continue to explore every possibility, says the latest annual report of the New Zealand land Potato Board.

The report said that the board was mindful that in some countries a considerable industry was carried on in the manufacture of potato by-products, but further inquiries it had instituted had met with the same result. Reports from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and from several manufacturing concerns all agreed that certain products could be manufactured successfully but with the important reservation that it would not be an economic proposition. In New Zealand the production of potatoes was essentially for home consumption and any industry would have to depend on what was left over. It was most unlikely that growing could be expanded sufficiently to supply an industrial outlet large enough to cushion the market for human consumption against normal seasonal fluctuations in yield. If that market was not to be further disturbed it would be necessary for the industrial outlet to gear itself to wide fluctuations in supply—a most uneconomic basis on which to establish an industry. Further because of the absence of any real concentration of potato growing in New Zealand transport costs to a factory would also be high. In an experimental project a few years ago the actual cost of processing potatoes for stock food, without any allowance for the cost of the potatoes to the factory, proved to be higher than the economic value of the processed foodstuff.