OUR PRINCIPAL INDUSTRY

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 109, 11 May 1933, Page 10

OUR PRINCIPAL INDUSTRY

All is not well with the New Zealand dairy industry, the paramount industry of the Dominion today. So much is made abundantly clear by Professors Riddet and Marsden. in an exhaustive report on the subject to which fuller reference is made in another column. As they say, it is agreed that all is not well with diat industry. To some extent corroboration of their criticisms is found in the prices realised in .Great Britain for New Zealand dairy produce when compared with those of Denmark as to butter and Canada as to cheese. Great Britain is now almost the only overseas market open to New Zealand butter and cheese, and its requirements must be assiduously studied and met. The era of two shillings a pound for butterfat has gone for good, it would seem, but given improved industrial conditions in die United Kingdom there does not appear to be any reason why New Zealand butter should not command 116s per hundredweight and cheese 66s per hundredweight, as they did during the first half of 1914. Such prices look princely today in comparison with the ruling rates of 74s to 75s for butter and 43s to 50s for cheese— and diese are advanced prices on rates recently ruling. What Professors Riddet and Marsden so strongly emphasise—and that in perfectly simple and candid terms —is first a realisation of the great changes that have taken place in the dairy export trade, and next the vital 'necessity of adjusting the industry to diose changes; and, above all, the setting of our own house in order so as to facilitate and accelerate that adjustment That the case, as the professors state it, is one of urgency diere appears to be no doubt.