AN IMPORTANT FACTOR

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 68, 17 September 1930, Page 10

AN IMPORTANT FACTOR

Dairy produce within recent years j has displaced wool in the premiership of the Dominion's export trade. Upon its success now largely depends not only the welfare of all directly engaged in it, but of the people of New Zealand in general. With prices for all commodities at the lowest levels since the Great War— and some of them below 1913 levels —returns from butter and cheese exported by New Zealand have had to fall into line. But circumstances are very different to-day from those of 1913, for dairy production costs are substantially higher, tariffs have closed certain markets, Great Britain is now the only market with an open door with foreign competition in that one free market fiercer than ever before, and buying forces are organised into a solid and seemingly impenetrable phalanx. Fortunately New Zealand has natural features which justify its description as the best dairying country in the world in respect to climate and pastures, and its herds are now greatly superior in productivity compared with those of 1914. It is the remotest source of supply of butter and cheese for the British market, but is connected by a speedy and highly efficient shipping service, and it has the advantage of high production at a period when Northern Hemisphere dairy supplies arc at their lowest. For all that, it has to meet with competition from southern countries, Argentina and Australia, and, to a probably increasing extent, from South Africa. Therefore, it is of almost vital importance to New Zealand that quality, service, and goodwill should.be the subjects of unremitting attention on the part of all in the dairy industry. That industry has had its lessons in all directions, but now that its new season is well in its stride special care should be exercised, as it is by the Department of Agriculture to the limits of its powers, that not only the good name of New Zealand in the British market shall be maintained, but fully justified, and the great problem of how best to keep and enlarge this industry approached with coolness and sound sense.