CHEAPER FRUIT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19604, 5 April 1927, Page 12

CHEAPER FRUIT.

Sir, —As one from Fiji visiting the Dominion, I have been interested in the correspondence in your columns relative to the fruit trade. Children in .New Zealand schools ai'e being urged to eat more apples, oranges and bananas, and everyone will agree that a fruit diet is the healthiest diet. To live up to these ideals, however, consumers would like to see fruiterers reduce the prevailing high prices of fruit, not excluding island fruits, which cannot be grown in the Dominion. Mothers and fathers would like to know why, after being brought long distances across the Atlantic, bananas, pineapples, oranges or lemons can be sold cheaper in laondon than in Auckland, although we are so near to wonderfully fertile islands where cheap-living Fijians, Tongans and Indians are growing fruit with the minimum amount of toil'! Fiji, for example, is only three or four days* journey distant, and every traveller by the Tofua or the Canadian mailboats can tell of the low prices paid to Indians for their fruit in or near Suva. .Within recent months I myself have seen pineapples sold at the height of the ripening season in different markets near Suva at 30 for a shilling. The Punjab growers commonly sell them in Suva at eight to fourteen per shilling. True, they are dearer in the winter, and next year the prices may rise now that a cannery has been started in Suva. Or, take bananas. A case may sell at something just below or above a guinea in Auckland, and yet such a case can be bought in Suva for from five to eight shillings, according to the season. I am ignorant of the Union Steam Ship Company's wholesale freight charges, but if a passenger brjngs a case of bananas or other fruit with him the charge is only three shillings. Cheaper fruit would not only be welcomed by thousands of mothers of families, but it would give a much-needed impetus to the fruit trade, both trade with the Cook Islands and Fiji, and also within the Dominion. It is doubtful if the grower is over-paid—certainly not in Fiji. "Eat more fruit" is an excellent slogan, but as prices are, the public simply cannot afford it. FRtrxT-LOVBa..