The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE THURSDAY, APRIL 4, 1918. THE BRITISH MEAT TRADE.

Taihape Daily Times, 4 April 1918, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

THURSDAY, APRIL 4, 1918. THE BRITISH MEAT TRADE.

(With which is Incorporated The Tftihapo Poet and Wail«a*riin« N«>wa>.

The meat crisis in Britain has brought to light many of the atrocious practices of the meat middleman, or wholesaler. It is time that farmers should realise that these nefarious traders are a curse scarcely second to the huge meat trusts, whose operations have temporarily been scotched by legislative control of the meat business which had been forced upon the Government as much by the machinations of these meat vipers as upon any shortage of supply. When a maximum price was fixed in England the wealthy wholesalers even moved Parliament, in the hope that their exploitation would not be' crushed out. they used the farmers as a lever with the Legislature. Noble Lords of the realm took part in the endeavour to keep maximum prices up, saying that farmers could not produce-pigs at eighteen shillings for twenty pounds of live weight. Lord Selborne presided at a meeting at which a most serious warning was addressed to the Government that fixing a price so much below cost of production would create an alarming shortage and would lead to disastrous results. He might have added that the disastrous results would only have been felt by wholesalers. How much those parasites on the farmer and the consumer cared about disastrous results to the starving British people is evidenced in the methods they adopted in continuance of extorting huge profits despite fixed maximum prices. In selling to the butc»s they charged for parts that KadTno value whatever; they shillings for a head and pluck, and they refused to sup.butchers who would not submit to- such robbery; and yet these men.parasites on the community—seriously .approached the legislature .with a complaint that ,iust upon elevenpence per pound for live w T eight pigs was not profitable to the producer. ■ , The ,butchers were as much the victims; of the middle Octopi as the producers. The latter are notably mostly within good grip of the bloodsucking tentacles, while the butchers are starved out altogether unless they pay a sovereign for that which will \ only bring a very few shillings, and these extortionists are the men who talk glibly about disaster for the consumer. De- \ spite the Empire being in the greatest stress, when every citizen, rich and poor, is told that it is imperative he should make sacrifi?c3'to enable 'the menace against freedom to be beaten off, these batteners on the nation's food have the impudence to approach Parliament to preserve their rights to robbery, and failing that they put the laW-fisJed miaxSnvum price's at def. fiance and still keep up the price of meat to consumers by compelling, retainers to pay for valueless offal, and the Outrageous price of twenty-shil-lings for a head and pluck. The needs of the people of Britain have become so extreme that for the time being parasites on the meat business have been shaken off partially. After causing much trouble and delay in munition and gun factories and in other factories on which the prosecution of the war depended the meat vipers had to be curbed and chained down. These interlopers into the meat business are the wolves of modern commerce, and their voracity is practiced to a shameless extent; they care not what disaster follows their robbery and exploitation. Briefly, no honest man can read of their disgusting practices wdthout feeling ashamed of belonging to the same race. The dealer is such a menace to the welfare of both producer and consumer that this toleration is something to marvel at. So long as farmers ally themselves - with meat dealers they will have the masses of the people opposed to them; but the robbery and exploitation of war and pre-war days will have short shrift after peace is declared. The eyes of the people have been opened by commissions and enquiries so that they will not submit in future to what they have endured in the past.