Japan Buying Increased Quantities Of N.Z. Casein

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28939, 6 July 1959, Page 10

Japan Buying Increased Quantities Of N.Z. Casein

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, July 5.

The Dairy Products Marketing Commission will supply a record quantity of casein to Japan in the next 12 months, according to the general manager of the commission (Mr P. B. Marshall), who returned at the week-end from a visit to New Zealand’s dairy markets in the Far East, in the course of which he negotiated new contracts with Japanese casein importers. In the season which ends on July 31, New Zealand will have supplied 3500 tons of casein, worth more than £500,000, to Japan. Mr Marshall said the new contracts called for shipment during the season beginning August 1 of a quantity greater than this, but he was not at liberty to give the actual tonnage.

Mr Marshall said the commission had sold increasing quantities of casein to Japan in recent years. Five years ago, that country was taking only a few hundred tons a year. Now the commission was supplying the greater part of Japan’s total casein market.

“There is generally, among Japanese traders with whom the dairy commission is associated, a sense of satisfaction with the trade agreement recently negotiated between New Zealand and Japan,” said Mr Marshall, “and the prospects of developing the volume of the dairy products trade with Japan are good, particularly in the various forms of non-fat milk solids.

“A substantial volume of trade could be developed in skim milk powder if only the United States could be induced to stop dumping. Japan is obtaining nearly all its import requirements of skim milk powder, totalling over 20,000 tons a year, from the United States, and the last purchase of 5000 tons was obtained at 3 J cents per lb, or £2B a ton. which compares with the present world market price of around £75 a ton.”

Mr Marshall was accompanied on his visit to the Far East by the Dairy Commission’s export sales manager, Mr S. T. Murphy, and by Mr C. S. Martin, of the Department of Agriculture, one of the leading experts in New Zealand on dairy products manufacture. The party spent a week in Japan and paid brief visits to Hong Kong and Manila.