FOOD FOR GERMANY

Evening Post, Volume XCIV, Issue 40, 16 August 1917, Page 7

FOOD FOR GERMANY

FROM SCANDINAVIA AND

HOLLAND.

A despatch from Washington on 7th July says that evidence that Germany is obtaining vast quantities of food from the European neutral countries has been presented to the United States by Great Britain for the American Government's guidance in determining an export control policy. Much of this, the British statistics purport to show, is replaced by the Tueuirafe with imports from America.

From Scandinavia and Holland, the British information sets forth, enough fat is going into Germany to supply 7,700,000 soldiers, virtually the entire arany of effectives in the empire. German imports from these countries, it is declared, reduced to calories, will equal the total ration of 2,500,000 troops, the size of the Geranan army in the West. German purchases of foodstuffs abroad are made through the Government Department of the Interior, which has organised a special division to buy from the neutrals. In the'early days of the war the German Government stimulated importation of food by excluding imports from operation of maximum price laws, but this drew such a vigorous • protest from German producers that the practice was stopped. Now the German authorities are said to be using coercion, exchanging for foodstuffs bought in the neutral countries coal and other commodities necessary for maintenance of the neutral industries. To some extent these coercions have been recognised by the British in operation of their blockade, but with the entry of America into the •war the British believe an arrangement can be made for supplying the neutrals with most of their necessary requirements from the Allied countries.

All of the northern European neutrals have made regulations limiting food exports to Germany, but producers and merchants, the British claim, are violating the laws because of high prices they arc obtaining. Some merchants, they declare, have made millions out of this illegal trade. The British data carry the following table as representing the minimum of food exports from Scandinavia and Holland to Germany in 1916 : Butter, 82,----600 metric tons; meat, 115,800 tons; pork products, 68,800; condensed milk, 70,000; fish, 407,000; cheese, 80,500; eggs, 46,500; potato meal, 179,500; coffee, 58,500; fruit, 74,000; sugar, 12,000; vegetables, 215,000. These figures are most impressive, it is asserted, in relation to fate, the scarcest food in Germany. Fat, it is claimed, is the only food seriously lacking now in the diet,of the German people. Imports of this food, the British declare, furnish one-fourth of the daily German fat ration.

American oilcake exports to the neutrals, the British brief says, find their way into Germany through the sale by neutrals of dairy products; the United States, it is declared, now holds in its hands the power to prevent all exports of butter and cheese from neutral countries into Germany by refusing to license foodstuffs shipments.