Board to stay with Conference Lines

Press, 19 September 1977, Page 7

Board to stay with Conference Lines

NZPA London The Dairy Board will stay with the British Conference Lines to get its butter and cheese to Britan, in spite cf competitive rates from the Soviet Union. The Dairy Board, the Meat Board, and the Conference Lines will meet next week for their annual freight rate talks—and the chairman of the Dairy Board (Mr L. Friis) said that it would stay with the British group of shipping lines. ■ The intrusion of the Russian merchant fleet into world trading is of concern, said Mr Friis. “It is doing in the shipping world what the European Community is doing in agriculture — disrupting world-wide patterns.'' The Soviet Union has increased its merchant fleet four-fold in the last 10 years and now' carries about 12 per cent of the world’s cargoes.

The Americans were particularly concerned, Mr Friis said; and evidence of British 1 concern was given last month f when a junior Minister of e Transport in Britain, Mr Clinton Davis, discussed the t Russians’ undercutting of e freight rates with the Deputy k Prime Minister (Mr Taiboys) e and the Minister of Trans,f port (Mr McLachlan). ) Russian ships- had carried h some of the relatively small '- sales of New Zealand butter to the Soviet Union, but Mr i- Friis said there was no plan o to use the Soviet fleet more ’’regularly. n Next week’s talks are e scheduled to last three days, s although so were last year’s i- —and they continued for "imore than a week of what i-ithe Meat Board’s chairman it (Mr Charles Hilgendorf) de; s scribed as "reasonably tough 2[talks. , , . s| The talks this year, which 'were to have been held in

-(Wellington, but were s i switched to London so that 1 the principals could go to i 1 Europe at the end of the f week for a ship launching, r are expected to be smoother, e Increases of 11.27 per f cent for meat producers and y 727 per cent for dairy cargo ) were agreed on last year. - Traditionally, one of the contentious areas is how j best to arrive at increases [1 which can be bome equally by r the two boards, which have r different trading patterns and n therefore different shipping e needs. Teams of board and e shipping-line advisers pore it over complicated accounting s formulae to arrive at the rjdecisions. t| The companies making up n|the Conference Lines are j; Shaw Savill; P and O Blue I Star Port Line; the New Zeah land Line; and Associated n,Container Transportation.