COMING PAPER FAMINE

Evening Star, Issue 17393, 1 July 1920, Page 2

COMING PAPER FAMINE

WHY THERE IS A WORLD SHORTAGE. The world has suddenly begun to realise that paper i« one of the prime necessi- ’ ties of life, and that it is now faced with a serious shoitage—which may easily develop into a famine—of that commodity ’ Paper was never more in request, but, unfortunately, the output of the papermaking industry throughout the world is greatly below the requirements of the numerous purposes to which, paper is nowadays. applied. This is duo to the fact that, there is a great scarcity of papermaking raw materials, and this, after all, ■ is the crux of the situation ,ag it is today. ' j tin far as Great Britain is eon*filed, papermakers 1 supplies of wood pulp have been - mainly obtained from Sweden and Norway, both of which countries are suffering from conditions to which they were i reduced during and alter the war by the restricted supplies of coal from this and other countries. So much was this the case that aiuenormous amount of valuable I wood which would otherwise have been utilised for the production of pulp was i e.-iipioyed for the purposes of fuel in in- ■ dustiies, on railways and coasting j steamers, and in other ways. j In their turn, therefore, Scandinavian j pulp manufacturers are handicapped by a 'short supply of pulp wood, while the high ; labor costs in the forests and in ‘the i pulp manufactories hare been responsible 1 to a very large extent for the enormous i increase in values which has taken place. 1 In Sweden and Norway there are something like 350 chemical and mechanical pulp-making concerns, many of them owning more than one mill. Prior to the war 1 the Scandinavian output of wood pulp was about 2,815,000 tons per annum, of which Britain absorbed nearly 1,000,0C0 tons, while the United States, Germany, and other paper-producing countries wore also large consumers. Nowadays the world-wide demand for Scandinavian pulps is so much greater than the supply that the average prices of all kinds of pulp have advanced by not less than 600 per cent. Turning to the other side of the Atlantic, the pulp and paper situation i probably even worse than in Britain. Canada prod ices something Like tons of paper per annum, and after supplying their own needs finds a ready market in the United States for L.,e greater pan of the remainder. The Dominion is making rapid progress with the development of its wood pulp industry, the output o." which, according to the latest available official figures, rose from 363,079 tons in ISOB to 1,464,508 tons in 1917. Its illimitable virgin forest areas and its policy of conservation and reafforestation should in the near future make Canada one of the greatest pulp and paper-producing countries in the world, but to-day she cannot ir eet an\ thing like the demand for either commodity ~ from the United States—which normally takes 75 per tent, of her output of paper—or from Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

In the Uni.eJ States, where the papermanufacturing industry has attained to enormous proporthns, 'the situation is so acute—(notwithstanding that American pulp and paper mills are being op-endec, to their maximum capacity—that American newspaper publishers have urged upoi the Secretary of State the neces-ity idragooning Canada into lifting the' embargo on the export of pulp wood by the employment of retaliatory measures.' The Provincial Governments of Canada in refusing to permit the export of pulp wood grown on Crown lands are naturally unwilling to exploit their forests, without regard to conservation, but are perfect!', willing to continue to send to the United States most of their output of print paper It is extremely doubtful whether the paper consumer—large or small—wil 1 experience much relief in respect to price within the next two or threc'yeaj-s. While wood pulp continues to be the piincip; raw material for paper-making, conservation of the world's pulp wood areas shock certainly be supplemented by a thorough investigation of the adaptability of oi-ho: fibres to paper-making purposes.—[By the Editor of ‘The Pape-rmaker.’]