America's Surplus Food

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 779, 25 June 1954, Page 16

America's Surplus Food

LPP BPP Extracts from recent commentaries on the international news, broadcast from the Main National Stations of the NZBS

ducts are now bursting through available storage capacity in the United States. The stuff pours off the efficiently-run and productive farmlands, and some of it goes, not down the throats of expectant consumers as might be anticipated, but into storage depots where it accumulates and accumulates. ... The butter stocks held are well over half New Zealand’s total production in the °52-53 season. . . The cheese position is worse-the U.S. is holding stocks greater than the entire 1952-53 N.Z. output. . . Dried milk stocks in the U.S. are getting on for three times our annual output of all processed milk products. .. The U‘S. citizen .. . buys food in the ordinary way, as a consumer. But the U.S. citizen isn’t buying enough in this way. The flood of products from the farms is just too great. And so the U.S. citizen changes his guise and, in the form of the Community Credit Corporation, buys up the rest of the output and puts it on the shelf. And there it now sits, gobbling up Government funds and storage space, defying ingenuity in all attempts to shift it so far. .. Supply and demand are at the bottom of it all. The U.S. citizen, who is pretty well the total demand nowadays, with U.S. food exports dwindled to very low levels, could, I suppose, buy up enough farm produce to keep the stores empty, but . . . prices would have to come down with a bump. . . of certain farm proWe rightly regard the price level of our primary products as the key to the economic prosperity of the community as a whole. In the U.S., however, the farming section of the economy is relatively less important than in New Zealand. While a fall in farm prices would doubtless have severe effects in the U.S., they would be less evenly spread and less likely to carry down the whole economy to disaster. . . It’s argued that the least efficient farm producers will be the first hit, and that efficiency would be better served if they were stopped from turning out commodities that no one wants at prices they can’t afford to pay. Well, that’s all very well. Sweeping arguments of this sort might be misleading. And, anyway, most U.S. farmers don’t want to be squeezed by the pressure of falling prices, efficiency or no efficiency. It’s not certain, either, that town workers would welcome floods of newly-arrived migrant farm labour. And farmers in the U.S. have got votes. The consumer loses; he often eats margerine and indirectly pays for butter he'll never see to be stored away, and perhaps dumped cheaply abroad. Food bills are pretty high in US. cities, and the thought that they’re added to by taxes to keep more food off the market is hardly likely to be pleasant. The Government, too, stands in a bad position. If it lowers parity prices, an enraged farm vote could easily sink the Administration. If it doesn’t, these intolerable surpluses pile up and up. If it sells them abroad it offends countries like New Zealand, who rely on normal marketing conditions and cannot afford vast swings in supplies which may seriously disrupt sales. . . There’s no easy way ‘out for the U.S. Administration. The rage of frustrated

PPD DP OP DP sellers who’ve been caught by U.S. competition doesn’t carry voting strength. But it does weaken U.S. goodwill on a wide front, a breach the Administration will hardly face with equanimity. And where are the dollars to be found to buy U.S. produce? And, if they are found, can enough be sold to lower the surpluses without knocking the bottom out of prices. I doubt it. Destroy the stuff, then? This is cruelly ineffective, and a false gesture: in spite of these piles of goods, the world’s’ still a very poor place. No, this looks as though it'll have to be solved, as a domestic U.S. problem, by domestic means. Giveaways and sales abroad will help a very little, but as a slight relief only.

A. J.

DANKS

June 5, 1954,

BALKAN PACT

= -_ "THOSE of us who served in Greece will remember the medal ribbons of the more senior Greek officers, earned in wars against Turkey, and we remember too how nervous the Greeks were then about their more powerful neighbour Yugoslavia: and how the German thrust into Greece in 1941 came through Bel-

grade and into the plains of Macedonia, in the north of Greece. We should also recall how

strict was the neutrality of Turkey-but that her sympathies were plainly with the Allies, and her conduct since the war has been uniformly loyal to the United Nations Organisation. The four Turkish officers who recently | visited New Zealand were welcome ambassadors to our country, and the Turkish troops in Korea are amongst the best and most popular of our comrades there. No New Zealander can doubt the loyalty of Greece to the cause of democracy, nor the determination of its people to resist aggression. One of the amazing chapters of the post-war world’s history is the success of Marshall Aid to Greece -a.country that was occupied for four years, then split by a terrible civil war, and then faced with attempts at intimidation by its more powerful northern neighbour, Yugoslavia. It is still far from being a prosperous country-there are too many scars still to heal, but with the threat to its frontiers removed by this treaty (between Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia), it has a chance of getting properly to its. feet. And what of Yugoslavia, and its role in this alliance? We have all been puzzled by Marshal Tito and his split with Moscow that started about five years ago, and we have wondered whether he would be able to keep his country free of Russian domination. Enough time has now passed for the rest of the world to feel convinced that Yugoslavia under Marshal Tito is determined to remain independent of Russia, and that its people and its leader are strong-minded and tough enough to go their own way. This new Alliance strengthens Marshal Tito’s hands, and lets the world (including Russia) see that Yugoslavia doesn’t stand alone.

L. F.

RUDD

June 12, 1954,