BUTTER BOX TIMBER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18762, 16 July 1924, Page 7

BUTTER BOX TIMBER.

Sir,—ls the Herald of 10th hist, appeared a suggestion from Invercargill that further restrictions be placed upon Baltic spruce, which is being imported for butter boxes at a price defying competition by our own white pine. Thus, in Norway and Sweden (where the present cost of living has proportionately increased 50 per cent, more than with üb, and where the social conditions are at least equal to our own), commercially-grown timber, carried across the world, bearing the usual freight, insurance, and exchange charges, and a relatively heavy protective duty, can compete successfully with our own product, cut with the most modem machinery from the primeval! forest and bearing little more than the cost of conversion. Could a stronger indictment of our industrial policy be framed ? Is it to be wondered! at that primary producers (the farmers) are restive under the rising cost of subsidiary services, and that secondary producers find it impossible under our preposterous social legislation to compete for business outside the heavily protected domestic market!' When the nations once more get back to work and competition in the world's iiaarVets again asserts itself, the difficult ieu of our primary producers will be intensified, unless we revise our conception, of what constitutes reasonable remuneration for personal service, and insist that such shall bear some relation to the economic value of the service Tendered. 1 Meantime it would appear as though we must stand helplessly by and see our less fertile land go out o!f cultivation as unpayable under present working conditions. Harold W, Hudson.