WORLD'S WHEAT HARVEST.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9188, 10 September 1908, Page 4

WORLD'S WHEAT HARVEST.

To get some idea of what the loss is by a poor world's wheat harvest, let one assume a steady consumption of, say 400 million auarters. Taking the wheat harvest of 1906-7 at 410 million quarters, and that of 1907-8 at 370 million quarters, it is worth while to work out the economic consequences. The "Economist" puts the average price per quarter paid for wheat of 1906-7 by consumers in the year beginning September Ist, 1906, to be 28s, and the price paid in the current wheat year, beginning last Septembei, to be 325. On this basis the deficient win at harvest of last year will have exchanged for £592,000,000, and the abundant wheat harvest of the preceding year for £574,000,000. Thus the growers of wheat actually gained by the bad season eighteen millions sterling; and one or two countries, particularly Argentina, which had bumper crops, literaly reaped a golden harvest. But if wa turn from the special interests of the farmer to the general interests of the world, we see this trifling advantage of eighteen millions turned into a disastrous loss. If, as stated, we assume the consumption at 400 million quarters, it appears that whereas in the year beginning September Ist, 1906, the consumers of wheat paid £560,000,000, in the year beginning September Ist, 1907, they will have paid £640,000,000-a difference of eighty millions sterling withdrawn from the purchases of other commodities, such as boots and clothing, the secondary necessaries ef life. When it is added that rice, barley, maize, oats, and almost all other staple foods rose more or less with wheat, and that wages generally have been rather lower, and employment scarcer in all the great industrial nations of the world, the mind is able to obtain some rough measure of the frightful catastrophe involved in a deficiency of the world's harvests.