PRICE OF FOOD

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2430, 8 April 1915, Page 7

PRICE OF FOOD

WHAT THE FOOD COMMISSION

When people in New Zealand talk of the rising prices of foodstuffs they omit, writes a corresjwndent, to make tie slightest comparison with prices which happen to be ruling in other parts of the British Empire. In a letter received ■in _ 'Wellington recently from a lady residing in the Isle of Wight (England) the writer states that sugar ordinarily sold at 2d. per lb. is now being sold at 4Jd. per lb.; bread that used to cost 2id. per (21b.) loaf, was being retailed at 4d., and coal had risen from 275. 6d. to 40s. per ton. There are those, too, who have scoffed at the work of the Food Commission without actual inquiry into what has been done. • In November last an arrangement was arrived at whereby, the Colonial ' Sugar Refining Company, which obtains the whole of its raw sugar outside New Zealand, agreed not to charge more than £20 per ton until the end of June, though at that time they could have disposed of all their stocks at a price in excess of that figure. That is the reason why No. 1 sugar is now obtainable in New Zealand at 2Jd. per lb., a price lower probably than anywhere else in the British Empire. That arrangement was made at a time when the Sugar Company could have placed the whole, of its stock with the Imperial authorities at £25 per ton. It is computed that the amount of sugar used in New Zealand between the date of the agreement and the ond of June next, would be 30,000 tons approximately, so that a saving of £150.000 was effected in that ono line alone. Indeed, had the company gone back on New Zealand altogether, as it could have done, in view of the big demand occasioned by the butting off of the German and Austrian supplies of beet sugar, this country might have had to seek new supplies from Java and China at a still greater enhanced figure.