COMING PAPER FAMINE.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 August 1920, Page XII

COMING PAPER FAMINE.

WHY THERE IS A WORLD SHORTAGE. The world has suddenly begun to realise that paper is one of the prime necessities of life, and that it is now faced with a serious shortage—which may easily develop into a famine—of that commodity. Paper was never more in request, but, Unfortunately, the output of the papermaking industry throughout the world is greatly below the requirements of the numerous purposes to which paper i<i nowadays applied. This is due to the fact that there is a great scarcity of paper-making raw materials, and this, after all, is the crux of the situation as it is to-day. So far' as Great Britain is concerned, paperraakers' supplies of wood pulp have been mainly obtained from Sweden and Norway, both of which countries are suffering from conditions to which they were reduced during and after the war by the restricted supplies of coal from this and pther countries. So much was this the ease that an enormous amount of valuable wood which would otherwise have been utilised for the production of pulp was employed for the purposes of fuel in industries, on railways and coasting steamers, and in other ways. In their turn, therefore, Scandinavian pulp manufacturers aro handicapped by a short supply of pulp wood, while the high labor costs in the forests and in the pulp manufactories have been responsible to a very large extent for the enormous increases in values which have taken place. In Sweden and Norway there are something like 350 chemical and pulp-making concerns, many of them owning more than one mill. Prior to the war the Scandinavian output of wood pulp was about 2,815,000 tons per annum, of which Britain absorbed nearly 1,000,000 tons, while the United States, Germany and other paper-producing countries were also large consumers. Nowadays the world-wide demand for Scandinavian pulps is so much greater than the supply that the average prices of all kinds of pulp have advanced by not less than 600 per cent. Turning to the other side of the Atlantic, the pulp and paper situation i« probably even worse than in Britain. Canada produces sonfething like 600,000 tons of paper per annum, and after supplying their own needs finds a ready market in the United States for the greater part of the remainder. The Dominion is making rapid progress with the development of its wood pulp industry, the output of which, according to the latesth available official figures rose from 383,079 tons in 1908 to 1,464,308 tons in 1917.

Its illimitable forest areas, and its policy of conservation and reafforestation should in the near future make Canada one of the greatest pulp and paperproducing countries in the world, but to-day she cannot meet anything like tho demand for either oommodity from the United States—which normally takes 75 per cent, of her output of paper —or from Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand find South Africa. ,

In the United States, where the papermanufacturing industry has attained to enormous proportions, the situation i 9 bo acute —notwithstanding that American pulp and paper mills are being operated to their maximum capacity—that American newspaper publishers have urged upon the Secretary of State the necessity of dragooning Canada into Hiring the embargo on the export of p :!p wood by the employment of retaliatory measures.