TOO MUCH WHEAT

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21218, 14 September 1940, Page 8

TOO MUCH WHEAT

PROBLEM OF SURPLUSES INTENSIFIED BY BLOCKADE INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION (Official Wireless) (Received Sept. 14, 3.15 p.m.) RUGBY, Sept. 13 The disposal of the surplus of the great wheat harvest in Canada constitutes a problem similar to that confronting Australia, which has large stocks from last year, also the United States and Argentina. “The problem today,” says the Times, “is intensified by the war blockade, but, as the world knows only too well from the experience after the great harvest of 1928, price fluctuations caused by the unregulated or irregular marketing of great temporary surpluses can have catastrophic effects even in peacetime. “It is not a question affecting the wheat farmer alone. One of the major preoccupations of the recent Pan-American Conference at Panama was how to deal with the surpluses of various products which are piling up in the South American countries. A committee has been appointed to arrange for their orderly marketing and for the necessary finance.

“The influential British mission about to proceed to Argentina, and probably later to other South American countries, to promote British trade in South America, must certainly deal with this problem, in which Britain is hardly less interested than the United States. On the face of it the problem can be solved only by international cooperation on a great scale. “If resolutely tackled now by the Government in consultation with the primary producing countries themselves they ought to be able to work out a comprehensive plan dealing with such surpluses not only during the war but as permanent world economic machinery, and thus prevent any repetition of the disastrous fluctuations in prices which were so largely responsible for the economic collapse in 1931.”