Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 1938. EMPIRE PRODUCTION AND TRADE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 April 1938, Page 6

Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 1938. EMPIRE PRODUCTION AND TRADE.

According to one of today’s cablegrams, the Empire producers’ conference at Sydney has accepted with slight modification the British proposals for regulating the flow of Dominion produce into Britain. At the conference problems of great importance confronting farmers in this country and in other Dominions have been emphasised in a fashion at times decidedly unpleasant. It is fortunately clear, however, that those declaring that producers in the overseas Empire must regulate voluntarily their exports to the United Kingdom or “take pot-luek” have been expressing rather the views of British farmers, who are demanding and getting high protection, than those of the population generally in the United Kingdom. In spite of the decision reached by the conference to recommend Empire producers to co-operate in establishing commodity councils, it may be hoped that the stout opposition offered by New Zealand delegates to any further extension of quantitative, regulation has not been wholly in vain. — As it has been envisaged by representatives of British farmers on this and other occasions, the voluntary regulation of exports from the overseas Empire no doubt would tend to give the primary producers of the United Kingdom a strongly secured and profitable market, but for the consuming public of that country it would mean relative scarcity and high prices and that any benefit would be conferred upon oversea producers seems highly improbable. Further discussion possibly may open the way to some more promising method of regulating Empire trade. A hopeful view of the proposed commodity councils was taken by the London “Times” when it observed the other day that: — One advantage of such councils is that they would enable the producers to familiarise themselves with conditions both in importing and competing exporting countries. Their success would finally depend on the extent to which they were able to create stable markets rather by facilitating consumption than by restricting supply.

Nothing in the recent experience of the countries which have been trying to stabilise markets by regulating supplies appears to warrant the hopeful opinion expressed by “The Times.” In the United States, where they have been carried much further than in the British Empire, experiments of this kind have worked out largely in futility. The aim of facilitating consumption is in itself admirable. Were it pursued with success, the consuming public in importing countries would be benefited, while at the same time the market available to exporting countries like New Zealand would be enlarged. Experience goes to show and to suggest, however, that producers in the overseas Empire can do little to facilitate consumption in the United Kingdom in any other way than by producing cheaply and efficiently.

The days when producers in the Dominions could expect to find tin indefinitely expanding market in the United Kingdom admittedly and obviously have passed, but organisation to meet changing conditions of interImperial trade, if it is to serve its purpose effectively, must be on a very much broader basis than was suggested by British delegates at the conference of Empire producers in Sydney. Different sections in the United Kingdom are at present demanding at once that New Zealand should regulate her exports of primary produce and that she should open her domestic market more freely to British manufactured goods. Fortunately there are leaders of opinion in the Mother Country, amongst them the British Prime Minister (Mr Neville Chamberlain) who recognise frankly that, while the Dominions need the widest market Britain e expand and extend their bound also progressively loan afford them, they are own secondary industries. If the Empire is to be developed in the interests of the British nation at large, and of humanity, planning to that end must proceed from a more enlightened .standpoint, than has been taken by the British delegates at the conference in Sydney.