"PROTECTION" AND HEALTH

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 22, 25 July 1936, Page 8

"PROTECTION" AND HEALTH

Diet is man's first line of de fence against ill health. As a protector of health, food can prevent more than medicine can cure; and one of the most notable victories in the history of the Pacific Ocean is that won by Captain Cook over scurvy in the eighteenth century. Scurvy is amenable, both as to prevention and cure, to treatment by a diet of fresh vegetables, or lime juice, or lemon juice; and within a generation after Cook the British Navy had expelled scurvy from its ranks by the regulated administration of lime juice. In the late eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, a ship's difficulty on long voyages was to obtain supplies of the health-giving fruits and vegetables. Today the organisation of supplies is so complete that there is no mechanical difficulty and no appreciable price difficulty—except where a price difficulty is created by Customs duties or Customs restric--1 tions or by periodical embargoes, favouring monopolies. Among the fruits and vegetables that have a special "protective" value to the health of human beings the citrus fruits are pre-eminent. And we have seen in New Zealand how we can impose on ourselves a citrus shortage, for reasons politicaleconomic. The public's toleration of shortages and high prices, where these are clearly avoidable, is as peculiar as is the public's toleration of slaughter on the highways; and each of these peculiarities invites the psychologist, especially as public reaction against lesser things is often determined. Certain it is that the public would react violently against avoidable malnutrition and avoidable slaughter if these two were combined in one frontal attack, delivered at one time and against any particular group of the community. In the eighteenth century Norfolk Island, with its fruit and vegetables, would have been a life-giving haven to Captain Cook. But today the islanders who grow the fruit and vegetables are under embargo, and facing ruin. The Commonwealth Government, to whom Norfolk Island belongs, "protects" its own growers, and does not want the

Island's produce; New Zealand no longer takes it, nor does New Zealand lake Australian fruits either, except in the intermittent fashion revealed in this year's orange market. There is no space here to repeat the well-worn political-economic argu-1 mcnls; it is sufficient to draw attention to the League of Nations' ' advocacy—initiated by Australia — of a cheapening of "protective" foods, and to compare it with the citrus situation existing in New Zealand throughout the depression period, also with the financial difficulties of Norfolk Island thanks to the effect on its exports of Australian

and New Zealand fiscal policy. All that part of ihc League's nutrition report referring to fresh green vegetables, fruit, etc., could not have derived much inspiration from the recent history of Norfolk i Island produce, or of prices of potatoes in Australia, or (in New Zealand) of prices of citrus fruits, onions, etc. Nutrition, the League points out, can fail through insufficiency of income. It can also fail because of restrictions on supply. Norfolk Island is suffering severely and the consuming countries arc not helped. The protection of health, as understood by the League when it wishes to cheapen "protective" foods, and the protection of producing interests are two entirely separate things. But is it necessary that they should be not only separate | but conflicting?