The Sun THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1928 PROFITEERING IN POTATOES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 476, 4 October 1928, Page 8

The Sun THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1928 PROFITEERING IN POTATOES

SEVERAL enterprising persons are making a great profit these days on the selling of potatoes in the wholesale market. It is probable that one or two of them scarcely know the difference between the product they sell and dahlia tubers. Frankly they are neither interested in the production of potatoes nor seriously coucerned about the welfare of either growers or consumers. Their interest is confined solely to keen speculation in potato distribution, and the shrewdest merchant wins in a tricky commercial game. It has been reported from Wellington that merchants there are in the dark concerning the sudden and steep increase in the price of old potatoes. All that they knew was the surprising fact that a similar rise in potato prices had not been experienced locally in the past twenty years. This confession of Wellington commercial ignorance should be taken, like potatoes, with a pinch of salt. They must know quite well that the extraordinary rise of values in the potato market was created deliberately and quite legitimately, of course, by the activities of a prominent New Zealand mercantile firm, whose Wellington staff operated with eyes wide open to opportunity. Its alert buyers practically cornered the supplies for the wholesale market. They went nearest the mai'k in estimating the stocks likely to be available early this month, bought thousands of tons of potatoes at a reasonable price, say, less than £7 a ton delivered, held on to their big purchase until the retail market became hungry for potatoes, and then sold them steadily at ever-increasing prices. It is said that one merchant actually held up 12,000 sacks of potatoes at Auckland wharves and succeeded in exacting a high value for them, this operation naturally coming under the dear old law of supply and demand. There is talk now of the wholesale price vaulting to £l6 a ton, with a poignant regret that it may not run to £2O before the advent of new potatoes—prospectively a light crop in the Auckland district. As a result of unprecedented speculation and forward sales on paper, the housewife, instead of getting 10 or 121 b. of potatoes for a shilling, will have to pay 3d a lb. for old-season potatoes which, even at their best now, are anything hut the food of the gods. Still, a dietary foolish people will take an excess of starch in some form or other, and it so happens that potatoes are a popular diet. Since many of the merchants who had their fingers pinched complain about conditions as bitterly as harassed housewives, there is now a keen demand for the lifting of the technical embargo on the importation of Australian potatoes. It is rather late in the day to break the New Zealand potato ring, and fortify limited supplies with imports from Victoria or Tasmania. Though the Minister of Agriculture already has announced, in response to a perturbed protest from potato growers on Pukekohe Hill, where, in respect of maintaining good prices, European and Asiatic producers are as brothers, that the Government will not lift the embargo on Australian potatoes, a deputation of Auckland merchants has rushed off to Wellington to try and soften the heart of the Ministerial Pharaoh. He will be assured that a thousand tons of firstclass Tasmanian potatoes could he landed at Auckland for £7 15s a ton if the inspectorial embargo were made reasonable. That is the position, and, as usual, neither the grower nor the shopkeeper (to say nothing about the consumer as the hopeless victim) shares in high profits. The speculative middleman alone waxes fat and kicketh.