AMERICAN INTEREST IN NEW ZEALAND

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 182, 30 April 1941, Page 6

AMERICAN INTEREST IN NEW ZEALAND

Guaranteed Prices And

Taxation

WELLINGTON’S MILK SYSTEM

A study of New Zealand’s plan of guaranteed prices for farm products and of its system of taxing large estates to encourage closer settlement is being made for the United States Department of Agriculture by Mr. H. Bronson Cowan, now In Wellington. Mr. Cowan is senior agricultural economist of the division of marketing and transportation research, bureau of agricultural economics, United States Department of Agriculture. He is in New Zealand primarily to do certain work for the International Research Committee on Real Estate Taxation, of which he is director of research, but has been asked by the bureau of agricultural economics to make some investigations on its behalf. When he was in New Zealand three years ago, Mr. Cowan made a study of the Wellington municipal milk system; on this visit he will bring his information up-to-date, later writing a bulletin on the subject for the bureau. In ail interview yesterday, Mr. Cowan described the Wellington milk system as in many respects a model for the rest -of the world. Apart from one in Tarboro, North Carolina, and probably one in Rome, it was, so far as he knew, the only municipal system in ex-

istence. The milk boards of the United States and Canada, Mr. Cowan said, had been given very limited powers, and virtually nothing had been done to eliminate uneconomic plants and co-ordinate milk routes. It had been authoritatively estimated that as mi|ch as two cents a quart could be saved in treatment and distribution costs were a system similar to that - of Wellington put into operation.in the United States.