TRIBUTE TO DOMINION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 80, Issue 7152, 16 January 1950, Page 4

TRIBUTE TO DOMINION

COMMENT BY AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL “The Pastoral Reviewer and Graziers’ Record,” of Australia, in its issue of December 16 recalls that according to the annual report of the United Nations'Food and Agricultural Organisation food production throughout the world in 1948-49 showed a big improvement, except in Australia and New Zealand. In these two countries, said the report, only small changes in export supplies were expected m : 1950-51, with exports of all livestock ■ food products at a lower level than i in 1947. “There is not such a great 1 deal of scope for rapid increase in • New Zealand’s exports of livestock I food products, as she is already, in | proportion to her size and population, ; probably the biggest contributor to . the world’s food larder,” says ihe Australian journal. “So far as meat is concerned—and it is one of the most important staple articles of diet— New Zealand in 1947-48, from her small area of 100,000 square miles (little more than the size of Victoria), exported five times as much mucton as Australia, more than four times as much lamb, 12 times as much ‘pig meat,’ and not much less beef than the Commonwealth did. Her total exports to Britain alone, excluding canned meats, amounted to 338,900 tons. Australia’s exports to the same destination—Britain in each case took • practically the whole of the exportable surplus—totalled approximately ! 190,000 tons (including 45,000 tons of ! canned meat). Admittedly, Australia i has to feed many more people within her own borders, and also she is not ! as generously endowed by nature as New Zealand is for the production c.f ‘ meat, but even with due allowance for these factors there is no escaping the conclusion that Australia’s production should be much greater than it is, and that it should be increasing instead of remaining stagnant as stated in F.A.O.’s report.”