UNFAIR COMPETITION

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 306, 20 August 1932, Page 2

UNFAIR COMPETITION

SUBSIDISED FOREIGN SHIPPING j EFFECTS BRITISH TRADE PROPERITY OF THE NATION. Writing to a friend in Hawkes Bay a Cornishman whose home is near Falmouth, relates how sad it is to see the Fal river so crowded with laidup British ships. Vessels of all classes and fonnage, he says, lie crowded together, all out of commission and with little prospect of finding cargoes for months, perhaps years to come. He stresses the duty of the people overseas to travel on and use for cargo carrying no other than British ships, for it is upon the supremaey of her mercantile marine, that the prosperity of the nation and the Empire largely depends.British shipping has much to contend with in being faced with unfair competition, mainly arising from subsidised foreign shipping. The International Maritime Conference, whose headquarters are at Copenhagen, in the current issue of its puhlication refers to this "indiscriminate building of vessels on subsidies," and declares that it would be "almost poetic justice to resort to the same means to undo the evil which has heen done and to use the subsidies for breaking up tonnage instead of building it." The scheme assumes Government participation in many countries in breaking up tonnage, but shipping authorities in Great Britain considered that the Governments concerned would raise strong objections to it. A cable published some time ago, however, reported that Germany, the country which, while pleading bankruptcy and inability to pay war reparations, had nevertheless spent huge sums of borrowed money in subsidising construction costs of building new German liners, for competition with British, is giving her shipping companies twelve million marks (approximately £600,000) for scrapping 400,000 tons of their superfluous ships now lying idle. All this goes to show how lceen the foreigners are to indulge in unfair competition with the British Mercantile Marine. The plain fact is that Germany, Ameriea, Italy, and the other nations that are subsidising their shipping are individually bent npon building up their sea carrying trade at Great Britain's expense. This being so, surely, if in self interest alone, everyone within the Empire should support the British Mercantile Marine by every means in his power, remembering always that it is self reliant and not spoon fed as are so many of the commercial fleets of its foreign competitors.