BRITAIN’S FOOD

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24906, 20 June 1946, Page 5

BRITAIN’S FOOD

REDUCTIONS FEARED IN COMING WINTER “ GRIM AND MELANCHOLY SITUATION ” (Bee. 7 p.m.) LONDON, June 18. “The Minister of Agriculture (Mr Tom Williams), replying to the long House of Commons debate on food and agriculture, gloomily admitted the gravity of Britain’s food position,” says the Parliamentary correspondent of the “Daily Mail.” “He said: T recognise that it is a very grim and melancholy situation.’

“Mr Williams did not attempt to challenge the estimate-by a former Minister of Agriculture (Mr R. S. Hudson) that non-priority customers in the coming winter might get no more than

one and a half pints of milk weekly, that the egg average during the winter might be only four a month at best, and probably only three a month, compared with an average of six last year. Mr Hudson also forecast that bacon would amount to only six, and possibly four ounces a month, compared with eight last year, ‘a pretty grim prospect for the housewife,’ “Mr Williams agreed that a fall in milk supplies was inevitable, but he did not expect it to be catastrophic. He added that cuts in commercial pig and poultry rations would bring Britain back to the conditions of the hardest period of the war—l 943. He feared that home pig meat supplies would be reduced to the lowest war-time level.” The British Food Minister (Mr John Strachey) has arrived in Ottawa. He will go to Washington to-morrow, and return to Canada on Friday to complete the new agreement for the supply of wheat to Britain.