The Times FRIDAY, MAY 9, 1941. Fruit Marketing Anomalies

Manawatu Times, Volume 66, Issue 109, 9 May 1941, Page 6

The Times FRIDAY, MAY 9, 1941. Fruit Marketing Anomalies

The general shortage of oranges in the Dominion is attributable to factors over which the Internal Marketing Department has no control; but if the department’s handling of the available supplies results in the high rate of wastage alleged, its efforts to feed the market steadily, if sparingly, and ta avoid totally bare intervals, have only made bad worse. A Dunedin paper recently reported an observer’s estimate of losses in store there, due to reserving fruit that should have been marketed promptly; and a Christchurch fruit merchant agreed that the loss on stored fruit had ranged, a while ago, from 20 to 40 per cent.

When the department at short notice took control of the marketing of apples for the 1939-40 season, some deplorable mistakes were made and much good fruit was wasted. It was officially admitted that this was so, and the explanation Was that the department had encountered unfamiliar problems. It is not an explanation that can be stretched to cover and excuse blunders in handling oranges, which have been under the department’s control for a long time; and the Minister of Marketing should at once investigate and, where the control is faulty, call the responsible officers to account. At the same time, obviously, he should take up the now widespread complaints that the distribution of apples to the schools has been ridiculously mismanaged. Children in the apple-growing district of Loburn, says a Christchurch paper, have been regaled with apples brought from Nelson, and apples grown within sight of Hawke’s Bay schools have had to be carted into Napier and out again before the children could eat them according to regulation. Finally, the Minister might well make his inquisition complete and go into the question of the marketing of lemon 3. They are seldom plentiful; they are always dear. Yet it is repeated by one North Island witness after another v that lemon trees are being cut out or abandoned by the growers, and that lemons are left to rot because it does not pay to pick them for the Internal Marketing Department. This is among the State departments from which, or about which, it is hardest to obtain information. Its business is largely with the people’s food, a fact which means that it should work behind clear glass windows. If Mr. Barclay is wiser in this matter ‘than his predecessor, he will have them fitted.