The Gisborne Standard AND COOK COUNTY GAZETTE Published every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday Morning. Thursday, October 4, 1888. A BLACK LIST.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 204, 4 October 1888, Page 2

The Gisborne Standard AND COOK COUNTY GAZETTE Published every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday Morning.

Thursday, October 4, 1888. A BLACK LIST.

Be just ami fear not; Let all the ends thou aim’st at bo thy country’s, Thy God's, and truth’s.

It has been a regular custom with us to publish the imports and exports of the district. Many of our readers, we are quite aware, do not interest themselves in this class of reading, but figures are solid facts, and these figures at any rate afford material for much thought. A visitor to the district could not help being struck with astonishment on noting the list of imports which we published on Tuesday morning: an old resident might not thus be surprised, having prior knowledge with which to qualify his judgment, but he would admit that he has no reason to be proud of the results. Among the imports are fish, flour, oatmeal, barley, fruit, butter, and soap, but by far the most noticeable item is potatoes. It reflects anything but credit on this highly favored district that any one of the above articles should require to be imported. There was a time when Gisborne had its own flour mill, which, however, if we mistake not, languished for want of support. But if a flour mill cannot be successfully worked now, surely no such argument can be applied in the case of fish, fruit, and butter; soap and candles, too, ought certainly be manufactured in the district with payable results. The continual importation of such articles is a discredit to the community. And with regard to potatoes, can anyone inform us why Gisborne is compelled to import them by the hundred sacks? Only a short time back local potatoes of good sample were selling in the auction marts at five shillings a sack—the market was glutted and producers were content to accept prices which many say are barely payable ; yet now we can afford to get potatoes shipped to us from Canterbury. Is it impossible for Poverty Bay farmers, in their own market, to compete with Canterbury? One authority on the matter informs us that the great mistake with local sellers was that they failed to judge the market with accuracy ; the potatoes were rushed into Gisborne at an early period and a glut ensued, producers being afraid that if they did not get their hands clear the ruling prices would be further reduced. But from another source we are informed that the local article will not keep till late in the season, thus giving the outsiders an open market. However this may be, we should like to see the whole question further ventilated, for to our mind it is little short of disgraceful that a district endowed by Nature as Poverty Bay has been cannot supply sufficient produce to meet the consumption of the inhabitants of that district.

But in the list of imports perhaps everything else is eclipsed by the item “eleven sacks vegetables,” and more wonderful still, the importer is a Chinaman. Napier people were very much exercised a short time ago because they were compelled to import cabbages from Wellington, but enquiry elicited the fact that the Napier cabbage gardens were plagued with an insect which ruined the plants,.the Chinese gardeners being the only ones who seemed to keep their cabbages free from the insect. Still all this only makes it the more marvellous that the very Chinamen should here take to the craze for importing instead of producing. If the Celestials cannot wax fat on the produce of the rich land of this district then it is very different from the paradise which it has so often been painted. There is something about the contents of our import column so strange and unsatisfactory that the ordinary mind becomes mystified by it. Has the depression caused the energy to ooze from the perspiring pores of our settlers ?—it surely cannot be that the district is not, as we have always supposed it, capable of supplying an almost unlimited quantity of produce. Can anyone tell us why things are just as they happen to be r