CANADA CHALLENGES THE WORLD

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 784, 3 October 1929, Page 10

CANADA CHALLENGES THE WORLD

LIKE New Zealand wool, Canadian wheat touched record prices during and immediately after the war, and the prices realised then set a false standard by which values ever since have been judged. Even the steadily declining tendency exhibited in recent years has not fully persuaded the growers that the peak prices may not be maintained. When their efforts to preserve the values are complicated by outside competition, the elements of a disagreeable situation become apparent, and at the moment these factors appear to have presented the prairie farmers with one of those periodical crises that disturb the balance of the great wheatgrowing centres of the world. Again and again in the history of the world’s wheat, the inexorable movement of international economic forces or the operations of powerful and perhaps reckless speculators have produced a dramatic climax—an occasion like the present in which the world pauses to study with an almost ingenuous surprise the vast scale on which the production and marketing of a staple foodstuff is arranged. In the processes of the grain markets there is a grandeur unparalleled in any other realm of commerce. Montreal, now glutted with wheat, has become the greatest wheat port in the world. Across its miles of quays are dispatched not only the entire wheat output of Canada, hut also a tremendous share of the grain exported by the United States. Hither in recent years have come increasing quantities of American wheat, railed from the wheatlands of the Dakotas to Chicago, and shipped from there—the greatest centre of gambling in grain that the world has known—to Montreal by way of the Great Lakes and the Welland Canal. Canadian wheat from the prairie belt of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Western Ontario, traverses the same path toward the sea. It is a movement on a stately scale, a process hv which in the brief but vital harvest season the wheat traffic dominates the highways of Continental commerce.

But in this instance the march of the wheat cargoes has halted at Montreal. Canada’s European customers, among whom can often he included Germany, France, Spain and Poland, besides England, have been buying in cheaper markets. Russia, though not long ago actually forced to import wheat to meet internal requirements, may by now have recovered. The Argentine is becoming a growing influence. Every season, for some years past, the area under wheat in the South American republic has touched successive records. Even in England there is no sentiment in buying wheat. If the Argentine and the LTiited States can supply cheaper grain, the business is theirs, and however frantic the efforts of Canadian growers to control the price, however spectacular the sequels to their gestures of defiance, the simple laws of supply and demand must in the long run triumph. The price of wheat must come tumbling down, and even the sheltered wheat-growers of Canterbury may feel the ultimate effects.