FOOD FOR BRITAIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 518, 27 May 1949, Page 5

FOOD FOR BRITAIN

Sir,-Your -footnote~ to the letter signed L. D. Austin (Listener, May 6) is quite correct. Both could certainly be true. I quote here a few extracts from a newspaper cutting sent me from England. Last year so many potatoes were grown here or bought in Ireland that the Ministry of Food were glutted.. Farmers were paid the agreed prite, then were asked to buy _ back their own potatoes at a much lower price to be used as cattle feed. That little deal cost £9,000,000. Now ‘onions. Last year the Ministry invited Lincolnshire to gtow more onions, which it did. This year Mr. Strachey bought thousands of tons in Spain, Holland, France and Poland. As a result there will be a surplus of 60,000 tons, which nobody wants. Lincolnshire loses heavily, and has to watch the onions rot. Tomatoes: By way of encouraging tomato. gtowing in Britain, the Ministry again go to Holland and contract to buy more than the Dutch can produce. The farms, orchards, market gardens and glasshouses of England produce the finest fruit and vegetables in the world, employ thousands of people and represent millions of pounds of capital. We... are producing or making all these things, yet cannot buy them because they ere going to these same countries from which we are buying the same _ things, That is the answer \to L. D. Austin’s question, though whether or no he can make sense of it, goodness knows, I cannot, nor can the worried farmers of

England,

M.

R.

(Christchurch)