SMYRNA FRUIT TRADE

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 141, 19 May 1925, Page 11

SMYRNA FRUIT TRADE

ASTOUNDING REVELATIONS. LONDON, May 3. Astounding revelations regarding the insanitary conditions* prevailing in tjfe Smyrna fruit trade are made by Drh L. Haden Guest, M.P., secretary <n the Labour Part}' Commonwealth Group, and formerly Parliamentary private secretary to tho Minister for Health, who has returned to London from a visit to the chief fruit centres of the Levant, and who is contributing a series of articles to the Daily Mail.

In the first article, after referring to the precautions taken in England to ensure a supply of clean, homegrown foodstuffs, Dr. Guest says: “We have no control over the handling, packing and transport of the thousands of tons of foodstuffs which are imported Britain. “Figs and sultanas from Smyrna are sorted, packed and trampled upon under conditions of hardly describable dirt. The handling and packing of currants from Greece is better only by comparison. “Britain imports 100,000 tons of these sultanas, figs and currants. “The fruit-packing sheds in Smyrna are situated in little lanes off narrow, dirty streets, and are occupied by male and female workers who are miserably poor, ragged and dirty. They tramp barefoot in . and out of the dirty streets and in and out of the sheds where tho fruit, which is heaped on the floor, is packed by being trampled under their bare feet. “The conditions are dirty to an extent indescribable outside a medical paper.” Primitive sanitary rules exist, but there are no inspectors to enforce them. Lavatories are on the same floor as the fruit, and anyone entering a lavatory is supposed to wear wooden slippers, which are placed outside the doors.

“The rules forbid packers to spit on the floor or to compress the figs with their teeth in order to shape them.” The second article will give Dr. Guest’s personal observations of the packers. “BUY AUSTRALIAN.” The Daily Mail, in an editorial calls attention to Dr. Haden Guest’s revelations, and says: “Dirty, even diseased, Asiatics, working in filthy sheds in squalid lanes, are handling to-day fruit that we will be eating in a month. These conditions are sickening and intolerable and failing adequate safeguard against dirt and disease, tho people of Britain would be well advised to join the ever-increasing public which prefers to buy its fruit from Australia and other places within the Empire.”

Dr. Haden Guest, who is in his 49th year, served as a civil surgeon during the South African War, and also throughout the European war, for the first three years in France and for the remainder of the time in Egypt and Palestine, attaining the rank of majorin tho R.A.M.C. He also organised several hospitals under the French Red Cross. He was secretary and physician to the Labour delegation to Soviet Russia in 1920.