WOOL TRADE PROBLEMS

Taranaki Daily News, 24 September 1928, Page 15

WOOL TRADE PROBLEMS

BUSINESS BAD IN ENGLAND COLLECTION OF STATISTICS. POSSIBILITIES OF RESEARCH. (From Our Own Correspondent). Wellington, Sept. 19. The fifth of the series of London wool sales commenced on Tuesday evening and prices realised at the opening come up to expectation. So far as Europe is concerned this is a period of between seasons, for scarcely any new clip from Australia can have reached London. There should now be a comparative scarcity of the raw material in England, and had busmess been good there would have been a shortage, but the dullness in trade has forced users to adopt a hand-to-mouth policy. Users declare that supplies are ample to tide them over too interval. The position in the West Riding wool textile industry gets worse. The offilial organ of the amalgamated trades unions remarks that “the state of trade is awful in general.” It is stated that in one district alone there are between 4000 and 5000 operatives partially or entirely out of work. Those who are holding stocks of raw material still hope for a revival of business in yarns and piece goods. Mr. Ge. Wiliingmyre, wool market specialist of the Department of Agriculture, U.S.A., on his return from Europe, where he attended the recent Paris conference to consider the problem of collecting comparable wool statistics, states that international statistics on this commodity now sem likely to become a reality. * Delegates from the wool industries of England, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and CzechoSloviakia atended the conference and reviewed a schedule for immediate use in the collection of this information. The conference recommended that wool statistics be made compulsory by the passage of lews within each of the countries making it obligatory for dealers and manufacturers to report their holdings on certain dates and the quantity of wool entering consumption. Mr. Wiliingmyre while at Bradford attended a conference of Australian, New Zealand and South African wool growers and members of the British Wool Federation and the Bradford Chamber of Commerce, which was called to discuss difficulties of production and manufacture, changes of fashion and so on. He believes that meetings such as this could advantageously be held by wool producers and manufacturers in other countries. Organisation of the entire wool industry in the Continental countries fe said to have gone far. These organisations include wool producers, merchants, wool-pullers, commission members, spinners, weavers and distributors. Problems arising in any branch of the industry are brought to the attention of representatives of the different branches and free discussion is invited, usually resulting in a recommendation for correction, with the welfare of the entire industry in mind.

Little scientific research has been so far applied to the study of the “quality ” of wool as related to spinning power, whqther from the point of view of the sheep farmer, to whom the fleece is a marketable commodity, or from the point of view of the manufacturer, who must take into account such, characteristics as the fineness, length, colouring, lustre and crimp of his raw material. Referring to these attributes the Empire Marketing Board says they are affected by factors of inheritance, of climate and of food. They have hitherto for the most part been assessed at time of sale by the trained instinct of expert judges, and the absence of any scientific basis for judgment has lately been pointed by the adoption on the part of the U.S. Government of certain arbitrary standards, based on the character of fibres, which disregard many of the characteristics upon which the manufacturing values of wool defend. The United Kingdom possesses a greater variety of breeds of sheep than any other country in toe world and thus affords a specially advantageous field for the scientific study of wool qualities. The work of the British Research Association for the woollen and worsted industries established at Leeds, in the heart of the wool manufacturing industry, has reached a point where the possibilities of a scientific standardisation of wool quality are clear, and the working arrangements established between that association and the animal breeding research department of the University of Edinburgh have ensured that toe scientific standardisation required shall be explored in its practical bearing on sheep breeding.