BUTTER AND CHEESE
Sir-The implications of the commentary by Mr. A. J. Danks, printed in your issue of November 19, should not be allowed to go unchallenged. New Zealand frozen butter was retailed at 11d a pound in the United Kingdom, pre-1939,. It was 1/6 in New Zealand. The consumer here subsidised the producer, the butter being sold to United Kingdom buyers below cost. With the advent of the war, and subsequent food shortages, our cheese and butter were subsidised by the United Kingdom Government, which subsidy went in part to the producer, showing him for 15 years a good nett profit which he could not achieve in pre-1939 conditions. The balance went to subsidise consumption here. Every pound of butter and cheese consumed in this country for 15 years was subsidised by the British taxpayer. Now subsidies are off, and the industry is pained because its products do not appeal at a price which shows any profit at all. Butter and the sales thereof in the United Kingdom are referred to here as though all butter were the same commodity. Frozen butter is close akin to high-grade margarine, which, pre1939, was priced at 8% per pound. Fresh British dairy butter was 1/3 a pound. This latter product is now selling at 3/9, which it is vainly hoped the frozen New Zealand variety will fetch. It would command a price in somewhat the same ratio as pre-1939, about 2/8 retail, which would mean selling below cost. In my view, butter which cannot be marketed fresh, as a luxury, is finished as an economic product, and all those who have charge of the situation here have their heads fully or partially in the sand. Butter and cheese produced in the United Kingdom are no longer subsidised: nor on my present information is cream. Fifteen years of grace during which our dairy industry could have been organised and geared to the production of high-grade fancy cheese, for which there is an almost unlimited market, have most lamentably been allowed to slip away.
I. R.
MAXWELL-STEWART
(Wellington).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 802, 3 December 1954, Page 5
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344BUTTER AND CHEESE New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 802, 3 December 1954, Page 5
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