The Exploiting of Food Prices.

Woodville Examiner, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4627, 10 May 1915, Page 2

The Exploiting of Food Prices.

BUTTER is Is6d per lb in Woodville. Bread is the 2lb loaf. Cheese runs from various bases to fancy prices. Rice is up, oatmeal is up. Tea is up. Eggs are 2s per dozen. All through the chief lists of food stuffs the rise is apparent, and those we may call sub-necessaries, such as cream of tartar, turpentine, &c., are becoming dearer daily. In other parts of the world the exploitation of prices is more marked. In Melbourne butter is 2s per lb, and Only the wealthy can afford eggs, cheese, and bacon. All chemicals have risen nearly 150 per cent, in Australia as with us, and drugs are charged for the like measure. Yet both the Dominion and Commonwealth are fortunate when their lists are contrasted with American prices in which the 2lb bread loaf figures out at 8d! An English writer comments on this —“ America this season is the only source from which European importers can draw any important supply of wheat or flour. Is it then any matter for surprise that the loaf (in England) has risen in price ?” Comment is obvious. In America, where the wheat supply has in no way suffered, the inflation in the price of flour is most marked, and in the Dominions and the Commonwealth — which are in no way cut off from the Bombay and South Australian wheat fields the price of bread is not materially lower than it is in England.

We are no economists. We do not know the rules that govern trade transactions nor the terms that treat of them. But we try to be Just. We execrate the methods of the enemy waging war, ruthless and brutal methods, as all admit. But we can see that the belligerent foe dealing destruction and ruin wholesale on helpless women and children, has his plea for defence. He deliberately, from his point of view, deals with evil that good may result to his country. But for those who are not actually fighting, who are neither attacking nor bombarding, but who are nevertheless pillaging as surely as the invading Hun, through power that is theirs, not by right nor election, but through the accident of national unrest, there can be no excuse. The man who in time of his country’s peril makes use of his fellows’ need to further personal interests can lay no claim to the virtue of patriotism. He who in so swelling his influence or his bank balance aggravates the distress that is already dogging the less prepared among us is a traitor. Governments must legislate against him as strictly as if he were a foreign spy, for his doings are no less worthy of execration.