The Wanganui Chronicle WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 1925. THE PEOPLE’S FOOD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19364, 22 July 1925, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 1925. THE PEOPLE’S FOOD

Wrapped up in the general question of work ana wages arc the cognate problems of food, clothing and shelter. People must have food to eat. clothes to wear, and houses to live in. These are the vital necessities of living. It is therefore important that they should not be subjected to unfair exploitation for profit. There is a point beyond the nature of the food we eat, the style of clothes we wear, and the kind of house we live in, where one passes from simple requirements to luxury. With that aspect of social life we are not particularly concerned. Whatever a man elects to pay for the luxuries of life is his own affair. What society in the main is concerned about is the solution of such problems as will remove the causes of social discontent, for social discontent is the favourite, breeding ground for the germs of revolution scattered about by Communist agitators and others. In Britain for some years there has been a popular suspicion that modern systems of merchandising have placed the people’s food supplies under such control that exploitation is possible, and hence, in the hands of the unscrupulous, is being practised. The British Government, made aware of this state of mind by repeated protests against the price of food, and apprehensive of the possible effect of the spread of popular feeling upon the discontented masses upon which the Communist agitator has been battening, set up a Royal Commission to investigate the nation’s food supplies. The report of the Commission was published some time ago. Press comment thereon has now reached this country in the latest London files. Much of the comment is interesting and instructive, and moreover, carries an important moral for local sociologists and economists. The public is naturally suspicious, and rightly so, of trading combines or trusts. The professed object of a trading combination is to stabilise supplies and prices, and avoid ruinous cut-throat combination, but the very power which such an understanding puts into the hands of those who subscribe to it is in itself a danger. Power in any department of human activity is always open to abuse. On this point the London Daily Telegraph. referring to the report of the Food Commission, observes:

“The system of regulating supplies of an important article of food by a combination of private traders,” says the report of the British Food Commission, “is open 1 to serious criticism on grounds of public policy. Regulation with the view to the stabilising of prices may bo all to the good, but should not be in the hands of those who have an additional and a very different object. It appears to us that a good case has been made out for the establishment of a new statutory body, the creation of which is the principal recommendation attached to the report. Little as one may care for the extension of State interference with private industry, the principle of non-intervention in the case of the food supply services was surrendered long ago.”

It. has to be admitted, of course, that the growth of trading combinations with the corresponding elimination of the small dealers has been a natural and-inevitable result of the development of the principle of market regulation, the ideal of which has been to stabilise supplies so that there would not be a glut in one part and a shortage in another. This result is plainly accepted by the British Food Commission; which, however, recognises that the public must be protected in some way from the tactics of market-manipulators and price-riggers. The difficulty is to achieve this result without resorting to an oppressive and cramping extent, to the application of State interference with private enterprise.

The Food Commission has come to the conclusion that the best corrective to exploitation is publicity. It proposes that there shall be set up a statutory and independent Food Council representative largely of the consumers’ interests, which will issue a constant stream of information about the conduct of the food trades which it is expected will be of benefit both to the public and the traders. It will exercise a vigilant supervision over anti-social practices, and offer offenders .the choice of desisting or being reported to Parliament. In short it will rely

on the pressure of public opinion to check any abuse of the very wide powers inevitably acquired by the great firms and combines which dominate the staple trades. This seems to us to promise much more effective results than were achieved by war-time profiteering tribunals, which, as our own experience went to show, merely resulted in pot shots at the small retailers. Commenting on the proposal, the New Statesman displays rather lukewarm enthusiasm:

“The proposed Food Council will, we believe, if it is ever appointed, prove within limits a useful body. The strength of the opposition already shown to it by the trading interests is a measure of the fears which the suggested publicity—for that is all that is suggested—has aroused. But clearly neither the establishment of the council nor the carrying out of the minor recommendations made by the Commission is likely to have any considerable effect either on the level of food prices or, what is equally important, on their tendency to wide and constant fluctuation.”

In the Minority Report of the Commission—there are. in fact two such reports, but the other is so palpably Socialistic that it need not be seriously regarded—there is a point which has some application to our own problem of wheat supplies. The report believes that bulk purchase of wheat, and probably of meat, in various markets, would enable prices to be reduced, by establishing an effective counterpoise to the producers’ pools already at work, and rapidly spreading, in various countries. A stabilised price, it is held, is obtainable only by means of a central purchasing agency, and while such an agency need not be a Department of State in the ordinary sense, it would be out of the question to allow it to work save under effective public control. A stabilised price would benefit the farmer by eliminating one great element of uncertainty in his calculation. It would thus encourage greater home production and reduce our dependence on imports. In New Zealand we are at present trying out producers’ combinations, but not exactly in the same way as is suggested in the Minority Report above referred to. There the situation is controlled by the interested parties, though the Government cognisance may be held to bear some equivalent to public control. Certain it is that public opinion is able on occasions to move the Government to investigate a particular aspect of the food question, and this in the nature of things, is at least something.