RAW MATERIALS

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 February 1937, Page 3

RAW MATERIALS

COLONIES AS SOURCE. •'< The recent assertion in Germany that if the Reich had only a small fraction of Great Britain’s colonial .empire she would have all the raw. ■material she needs, has aroused much .discussion here. Such a statement was made in one instance recently by Colonel General Hermann Goering (says the London correspoitdent of the “Christian Science Monitor”). . So far as Great Britain herself is concerned, General Goering’s statement ,may be put precisely the other way round.

| In 1935, as indeed in previous years, I all the’ British colonies produced only | a fraction of the raw materials, which /Britain uses. Even if the much more numerous products of the self-govern-ing Dominions and India are thrown in with those of Britain’s colonial Empire they only account for about twb■fifths of British imports of raw materials and foodstuffs. If raw materials alone are considered, the proportion of foreign to Imperial imports is equally high. The British £oard of Trade returns do not show British imports grouped under the heads of Empire and nonEmpire goods. An analysis of the official statistics for 19.3.5, in order to establish how much of Britain’s food and raw material imports come from the colonies, shows how much from British India, how much from the Dominions, and how much from foreign countries. The result of this analysis will probably suiprise most people who have not made a close study of the question. Taking raw materials and articles Unmanufactured first, it is learned that in 1935 Britain imported altogether £211,758,000 worth of goods under this head. Foreign countries were responsible for £130,038,000 of this total; the British Dominions, £42,110,000; British India, £14,774,000, and the colonial Empire, properly so-called, £24,421,000. The odd £15,000 is accounted for by the omission of fractions of £lOOO when adding up imports of the individual countries.

METALS FOR GERMANY. I i According to the indications of the j Reich's spokesmen, German would preisumably be most interested in metals I such as iron, tin, nickel, copper, and ’so forth. So far as iron ore is conIccrned. Great Britain imported | £5.000,000 worth in 19.35, of which only £311,000 came from all the British countries. Dominions,, and Indian included. Sweden and Algeria, supplied | £770.000 each; Spain. £S90,000; varii ous smaller items made up the full [ total. British imports of non-ferrous metal ores amounted to £11.622,000. of which no less than £7,111.00n came from foreign sources. Apart, from copper ore and tungsten, of which Canada and British India (neither of them colonies) respectively supplied the major portion, the ore suppliers were mostly foreign countries. Bolivia - supplied about GO per cent, of the tin ore, and the British colony of Nigeria about 20 per cent. A large proportion of British unworked metal imports, however, appear not. in the raw materials groups, but under the head of articles wholly

or mainly manufactured. Analysing I these, we find that British India supplied £202,000, and “other British coun- . tries” £720,000 of manufactured iron I and steel imports out of a total of : £8,717,000. Belgium and Luxembourg between them were responsible for £3,251,000. In the manufactured non-ferrous group, Great Britain got nearly all her aluminium, all her nickel, ‘ and about two-thirds of her crude zinc from Canada as well as nearly half her copper. .About 30 per cent, of the manufactured tin —which includes ingots, bars, and slabs —came from British colonial countries. Tin, in fact, is the only metal which Great Britain is at present obtaining in large quantities from her colonial empire. But even of this metal more than two-thirds still comes from foreign countries, principally Bolivia.

MALAYA DIDN’T DO IT. No doubt Nigeria and Malaya between them, clmld have supplied the whole of Britain’s tin needs. But the fact remains that they didn’t. Evidently it was better business —this is especially true of Malaya—to sell a good part of their tin output elsewhere. On the question of gold, concerning which General Goering stated that Germany’s stocks had been “stolen” in reparations,’ it is difficult to disentangle the facts from the official statistics. Britain imported in 1935 £47,200,000 in unrefined gold bullion and exported £12,800,000. She also imported £180,200,000 of refined bullion and exported £146,500,000. It is not clear in either case how much of the gold in question was newly mined and how much merely transferred from bank vaults or the pockets of hoarders. Of the unrefined gold, the greater portion, £34,600,000 came from India, where hoarders had evidently been induced to disgorge by the high prices offered on the London market. Two colonies, British West Africa and Southern Rhodesia, sent, respectively, £130,000 and £5.192,000 of what must have been new gold. The Union of South Africa sent nehrly®£7o,ooo,ooo

of refined gold which must also have been freshly mined, but the Union, of course, is not a colony. It is hard to see, therefore, how Germany could have replenished her stocks of gold from the British colon-, ial empire even if she possessed the ■whole of it. In this connection a British M. 8., Mr. Herbert Williams, has pointed out that according to the published returns of the Reichsbank, Germany's stocks of gold actually trebled between J 1924 and 1931, which was the period! in which she was paying reparations. At the end of 1924, that is to say, | immediately after reparations began, the Reichsbank’s gold stocks were given as 760.000.000 reichsmarks. In May, 1931. Ihe month before reparations ceased, they stood al no less than 2,390,000,000 reichsmarks. At the end of September, 1936, the figure had shrunk right away to 63.000.000 reichsmarks. It is generally understood that the shrinkage is not entirely due to purchases of butter.