Sugar-Beet Industry

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 67, 11 December 1937, Page 7

Sugar-Beet Industry

"INTHEESTED."

Sir, — Tho statementa of Gedria Belfrage, an EngliSh journalist and travellel\ .on the sugar-beet industry. causo one to pause and think. With labour. costing twice as maich as in England, and land at least ten tinies as dear, how can there be any future here for that industry? Every boolc I have read referring to the costly su'garboet industry tells- the sarne story — - monoy and labour wasted. W e cannot alford any more cost'ly experiments. I Will be obliged if you can find space . for the following, which is talcen ftom the boolc "Away From it All'5: — ■ DOLDRUMS IN THE SUGAR ISLAND. Java's chief industry^ sugar, Was dead all the way i'n both directiuus from the neck. Many of the sugar- growers were Englishmen who in pre-slump days had buiJt up their businesses with England as their ciiief customer. . . There was no longer a profitable market for their crop in England or any other Western country, largely because.they eould not make their voice effectively heard from so far away against, the loud bawling of local farmers' lobbies for subsidies for the uneconomic beef^sugar industry on home ground. In England the taxpayers had presented the sugar-beet industry with £50,000,000, enabling 40,000 English workers to have parttime jobs at bare siabsi'stence Wage. Shippin^r companies made a direct loss of £500,000 a year through the decrease in sugar imports. Hundreds of thousands of workers in the colonial sugar plantatious had to live on air and bananas, and many planter-owners had nothiiig to do but to take a gun aud shoot themsel'Ves, They could not derive inuch consolation from the fact that jobs at under £2 per week had been found for iarm.- workers at a cost of , £3 a week per,gob to the English taxpayers;" and nothing could rid the planters of the obsession that it would have cost Englislf taxpayers loss than they had paid in subsidies to buy the same amount of sugar in Java and dlstrihtit.fi it fr6e.

Hastings, Dec. 10, 1937.