FOOD CONTROL

Otago Witness, Issue 3443, 9 March 1920, Page 23

FOOD CONTROL

POSITION IN THE HOMELAND. FOOD MINISTER'S STATEMENT. "WELLINGTON, February 9. The following article in the London Observer, of December 21, deals with the subject of food control, which was much in evidence at a deputation to the Prime Minister to-day, and is circulated for general information. It arrived after the deputation had separated, or it would have been laid before it by Mr Massey. One _ of the most petulant' and persistent questions of the moment relates to the matter of State control in trade and industry. Oyer and over again it is declared that the time has come,.and more than come, for the ending of this thing. Complaints against control are made on all hands, and elaborate arguments aro' wrought to prove it has outlived its usefulness, but there is another side to the quastion, and it was put to me (writes a representative of the Observer) by Mr M'Curdy, who, as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food, has had most ample opportunities for studying the working of control, and who is able to speak from experience. What are the lessons of the past, 12 months in this essential matter? "The problem of controk" said Mr M'Curdy, " is by no means limited to questions with which the Ministry' of Food ha 3 to deal. The future of the coal mines, the future of the lailways, the trade policy of this country with regard to the key industries, and the prevention of dumping, ,are all questions of control. Public opinion oscillates between extreme limits. On the one hand we are faced with demands for nationalisation or for government of industries by trades unions' On the other side stand people who are never tired of demanding the abolition of controls of every kind. It is a curious fact that where control has been most successful, the demand for de-control is most This is, perhaps, due to the cheery optimism of. the British people. They are convinced that because the war is over the effects of the war must also be at an end. During the whole of the past 12 months nothing appears to hare shaken that delusion. You cannot get people to believe there is a shortage of anything except houses. They believe that houses are scarce, because their experience proves to them that it is hard to get a house if they happen to want to move, but they simply will not believe that there is any scarcity of anything else at all. Take the question of meat, for example. __ Meat is now reaching this country from New Zealand, which was held up during the war by transport difficulties. The average newspaper reader discovers the existence and coming of this meat, and immediately begins to talk about a frlut. That is the popular word of the moment. There is a "glut" of everything —of meat, sugar, bacon, of anything the public most Wants, but what you cannot do is to persuade those same optimists that 120,000 tons of meat from New Zealand do not really balance the shortage of 360,000 tons in Home supplies; to say nothing of th 9 shortage in Central Europe, which amounts to 3,000,000 tons. If, in the course of next year, we are going to eat as much meat as we did before the war, there will really be no meat in the world to relieve the needs of Europe, and 1 am afraid our own people do not yet realise how bitter those needd will be. If the glut of meat that we hear so much about is to become a reality in this country, it can only be so on the understandnig that we oaTe nothing if the other people are to have no meat at all. As it is with meat so it is with everything else. We were all taught to reason from known to unknown, and it is quite natural when people see a few hundredweights of sugar scattered from burst bags upon the quay that they should get the impreawion of sugar enough and to spare, but that does not alter the fact that the world shortage of sugar is very serious. In fact the whole world is short of tically everything.. You cannot in one year get over the effects of such a period of confusion and diverted energy as was created by the war. Everywhere there is a scarcity. Everywhere there is necessity. Essential foodstuffs of all kinds are short, and must be short for some years to come. Af | er the Napoleonic wars the hardest period for this country was in the fifth year after the War, and the fact of the world shortage of all essential foodstuffs brings you at once to the matter of control. Now, there areja good many misapprehensions about control, and the people exercising in delusion that there is a glut of food in the world is accompanied by another which is to the effect that any temporary shortage is due to a bureaucracy, which cannot be happy Unless it is controlling something. I am sure that is quite unfounded. I know many men in the public service to-day who would be heartily grateful if they could get away from this business and return to their normal and more profitable occupations. _No sensible man wants to control anything, unless control ip proved to bo necessary to the oublic interest. In the course of the past "year we have made various attempts at de-coatrol, and the story of some of those attempts, and their consequences, is Worth telling. There was the case of oils and fats. We. were urged to remove all control, and give the public the benefit of abundant si.pphes and lower prices. We removed control The consequence of that was that in a fortnight the price of linseed oil' rose from £53 to £lo2*a ton, and of other oils in proportion. That meant, among other things, that our supply of margarine was imperilled. Margarine to-day, now that the world so short of butter, is one of' the most essential of all foodstuffs, and the supply of it was most dangerously threatened." There was nothing for us to do but to take the business back into our own hands. De-control had been carried out so thoroughly that the whole machinery of control has been broken up, and we had to begin all over again on fresh lines Then there was the matter of veal. While veal was controlled it was selling at Is 8d a pound. Three days after control was removed it had risen to ss, and within a week we had the Board of Agriculture coming to us to point out that the- future of the country s live stock was being ruined by the wholesale massacre of calves. There was nothing for it but to restore control, and immediately things returned to their former condition. "Then there wa<3 bacon." Mr M'Curdy paused and smiled refteciiroly. "}Ve have heard a good deal about bacon," Le went on. "Bacon rotting at the clocks, for instance. The whole story of bacon would be worth telling, but it would take too long. Now, briefly, it amounts to this: After a good deal of agitation it ■was decided to take off control. Immedi-

ately all sorts of people began to trade violently in bacon. Prices went up, and profiteers began to reap a happy harvest. We began to receive bacon of qualities which are quite unsuitable for this country. There are different methods of curing, and some of them produce bacon of a kind, to which we were not assuctomed. I daresay it is just as good as the rest, but we do not happen to like it. In a very little while we were compelled to put on control again, to secure the country's supply, and that is how the "bacon rotting at the docks" business came about. _ -It was not our bacon. It belonged to private traders, who had assured us that' de-cohtrol would mean lower prices. For four months the price of bacon steadily rose. Great stores of inferior bacon —in some cases tainted bacon—were imported into this country by private enterprise. No arrangements were made to arrivals, and the result was a glut of inferior bacon in the autumn. In August we resumed control. The price of hogs fell three dollars in a single day, and Has fallen steadily ever since. During the period of de-control bacon was sold over and over again by merchants, each taking a quota of the profit. In some eases the profit taken was equal to ten times the profit allowed under the control. To-day all the quays are clear, and congestion has been removed, and in the new year the British public will once more be eating controlled bacon. The public will have better bacon, and the confusion and congestion caused by haphazard shipments will be things of the past. There are three instances of the effects of control and de-control, but beyond this there is the wider question of what ought to be the general nolicy of this nation, and of the world with regard to control. Is the battle of Freetrade going to be fousrht once more on wider and more tremendous battlefields? Or are trade unions to control industries and trusts, to control prices, and people through their Governments to have no voice in these controls at all?. Before you can answer that, question you. have to consider the present, and the inevitable developments of trade and commerce generally, and that means, of course, that you have to consider the new demands of Labour, and the question of trusts. A great many people talk as though a trust was an essontjally vicious affair. Th ev clamour for the prevention of- the abolition of trusts, and they entirely- overlook the fact that trusts perform very useful functions. When the Ministry of Munitions got to work it found that in some industries it was utterly impossible to deal with a hundred little firms. If an adequate output was to be secured in time to win the war it was compelled to advise unorganised traders to organise themselves into one big body, with which* business could be done; and, of course, a bip organisation is, on the face of it. better from the point of view of the consumer. It makes for efficiency and economy in production and distribution. It can give far more effective service than the small trader. On the other hand, there is, of course, a danger that it may use its tremendous powers to profiteer on a large scale. That is the peril which so impressed the imagination of the America people that for many years before the war they had been doing everything in their power to fight the trusts, chiefly by passing laws to forbid them. Do what they could, however, they could not prevent the formation of these great combines. As each law was made some way round or over it was discovered; and it is only during the years of war that a proper method of dealing with combines was discovered; riot repression, but supervision and control. So it seems to me- that to talk about abolishing all controls is sheer nonsense. Some kinds of control there must be, and the questions are what kinds of control aro we to have? By whom are they to be exercised? and in whose interests? I believe that the commercial policy of the future will do all in its power to encourage big combinations, but will insist on their submitting to thorough and peremptory measures of supervision. Complete removal of all restraints and controls in any industry would, I am convinced, only result in a demand for much more drastic measures of control for nationalisation or trade union government in the near future. Between the drastic controls of wartime, and complete license to profiteer, there must be a moderate middle course.