BRITISH RATIONING

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 October 1946, Page 7

BRITISH RATIONING

GREATER SUPPLIES NEEDED BEFORE REMOVAL MR. STRACHEY’S STATEMENT [N.Z.P.A. Special Correspondent.] (Rec. 10.15 a.m.) LONDON, October 15. “Before any foodstuff in Britain is de-rationed supplies will have to be something like 30 to 40 per cent, higher than pre-war.” This statement was made by the Minister ot Food, Mr. John Strachey, who said that though the pre-war situation could be restored in the case of most food quite easily and quickly, yet the Government were determined to do something bigger. The very success of the policy olfull employment and good wages was seizing a huge new problem of supply. The British people, for the first time, were getting enough money to buy all the food they ought to have but it meant the Government could not take off the present type of fair and equal rationing as soon as they might, for they were unwilling to return to the “old kind of horribly unfair rationing by means of common wages and high prices.” “Our object is to take off the present kind of rationing and substitute no other for it. Then at last, and for the very first time in history, the food ofThe British people will be unrationed. It will mean both the growing of far more foodstuffs in Britain than have ever been grown before and the purchase abroad of more food than was ever imported before,” he said. Britain under rationing, added Mr. Strachey, was consuming 98 per cent, of her pre-war quantity of fresh and tinned meat, 83 per cent, of the prewar amount of fats and more fish, flour,. jam,, dried fruit and milk.