Greymouth Evening Star, AND BRUNNERTON ADVOCATE. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 1903 BRITAIN’S CEREAL WANTS

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 January 1903, Page 2

Greymouth Evening Star, AND BRUNNERTON ADVOCATE. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 1903 BRITAIN’S CEREAL WANTS

At the outbreak of the Crimean War, the south of Russia and adjacent portions of the Turkish Empire were looked upon as the granary of Europe. This very fact played an important part in the war—a war that most Britons now admit to have been a mistake. In later years the immense earn and wheat fields of the United States of America and Canada, and in a lesser degree those of Australia and New Zealand, occupied the position then assigned to south-east Europe. To-day, so far as Britain at least is concerned, the United States, Canada and Australasia supply her with the greater part of her imported cereals, Russia having until the last few years fallen off largely. With the extension of her railways, however, she is again moving forward, and expects within the next five years to be again one of the chief cereal exporters of the world Even now she has enormous crops. The Odessa correspondent of the London Times, writing under date of November 7th, says:—“ The railway block in South and South east and South-west Russia is steadily increasing, in spite of the patchwork methods resorted to by the managements of the South-western and other railways to relievo the congestion during the last five or six weeks. The majority of the railway sidings are completely crowded out with grainladen vans and trucks, and some dozens of goods stations in the principal agricultural centres have refused to warehouse the further quantities of grain carted to the station day after day by the peasantry. Something like the stupendous amount of 21 million poods, or 350,000 tons, of grain are at present lying either in the sidings or in the goods station warehouses of the Southwestern and other congested railway systems of Kieff.” The bulk of these vast stores are intended for European markets As next year the railway facilities will be greatly increased, the export is expected to be doubled. With cheap labor in Russia and consequent low cost of production, Russia expects to not only successfully compete with America and Australasia in the British market, but to considerably under-sell both and secure a much larger proportion of Britain’s trade. Russian competition, and especially Siberian, is one of the factors the Australasian colonies have got to deal with in the near furture. With a higher rate of wage, and a much longer and more expensive carriage, it will tax the colonies to their utmost to hold the trade they now possess.