BATTLE WITH TRUSTS.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1420, 25 October 1923, Page 5

BATTLE WITH TRUSTS.

ARGENTINK'S J>EELMTE DEFIANCE. BEEF EXPORT BUSINESS. (By Telegraph. Press Association.) WELLINGTON, Wednesday. The law passed by the Argentine Government fixing a minimum export price for beef comes as the first overt defiance of the great packing, houses established in the Republic. For a long time the big foreign "frigorificos" have adopted the tactics of offering less and less for the animals brought to their works. When the Government talked of laws to meet this situation there was a temporary improvement in quotations, but when the proposed laws seemed to have become forgotten the prices were again lowered. The- new national freezing works being erected in the city of Buenos Ayres were intended to meet this position by providing storage for cattle which the sellers could not hold, but in view of the determination of the foreign freezingworks not to operate while the new law remains in operation, the purchase by the Argentine some six weeks ago of the Anglo-South American Freezing Company's interests and works to operate only over the province of Buenos Ayres—the richest in cattle—is likely to play a more favourable part in meeting the situation says Senor Bidone, the Argentine Consul General in Wellington. "It is the first shot in a campaign that was bound to commence sooner or later," he said to a reporter yesterday. "Fjrom the cablegram the position is not very clear to New Zealanders. It looks as though the export of meat from the Argentine would now cease completely, but that is hardly the position. The AngloSouth American Company, now owned by the Argentine, will be able to slaughter a large number of the cattle fit to-day for export, and the matter of shipping is not such a very serious problem. In the year 55,000 vessels of over 10,000 tons call at the port of Buenos Ayres and many of these are altogether outside the influence of the big meat interests. Only approximately half of them trade to either England or the United States, and the remainder running to Denmark, Italy, France. Germany and Holland, will be prepared to carry all that the Anglo-South American Company can kill, which will be readily absorbed by those countries. The vessels that carry the meat of the big freezing companies at present cannot afford to go back empty, and the shipping problem will probably soon arrange itself. The new law is the gage of defiance to the trusts, and it seems to me that the Argentine Government has the better position of the two at present. The freezingcompanies have become a litie unmanageable and have wanted things too much their own way, but I do not think the present position will last more than a month or so."