OUR MOST POWERFUL RIVAL

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6546, 20 November 1924, Page 5

OUR MOST POWERFUL RIVAL

In addition to her enormous area of tillage land, the Argentine has 384,000,000 acres of rich pastoral land, the rainfall is good and artesian war ter abundant, She has also 22£ million acres of alfalfaV There are £850,000,000 of foreign capital invested in the country; of this nearly £700,000,000 is British. It will bet seen from this that Great Britain is really much more interested in the - development and prosperity of Argentina than she is in the development of New Zealand, land. Owing to the much shorter distance from the. En- . lish market, and competition for South American freights the Argentine exporter has hislfrozen meat carried at about the rate > we pay. .Meat exporters from the Argentine have a tremendous advantage over us in. the matter of exchange. The rat of exchange papable by the New Zealand exporter to-day is 45/per £loo. v The Argentine exporter pays the producer in the national - money known as the peso. The peso at par is worth a fractionj under 1/9, but its actual value to-day is only 1/5. As there are nearly ilj pesos to the pound sterling at par, it follows that the man who buys and exports ■ in sterling makes about 3/9 on every £l. South America has also'a big advantage in the fact that she handles about double the number of stock that is with in the Dominion, and has only half the number of;. - works.”—Chairman of the Feilding Farmers’ Freezing Co., at-an annualmeeting, • ' . .