Blame Ford!

For Low Prices of Copra

Peanuts And Cheap

Trucks

“If there’s one man, more than an other, to blame for this fall in copra prices, it’s Henry Ford.”

With this dictum, Mr. George Wilson, Sydney director of Morris Hedstrom Ltd., whose stores are scattered all over Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, leaned back in his chair and, with a characteristic twinkle, faced The Pacific Islands Monthly representative.

“Ford!” exclaimed the pressman.

“What on earth has Henry got to do with it?”

So Mr. Wilson expounded his theory.

In past decades, the West African negro, or the Indian or Chinese farmer, tilled his little bit of ground, grew his peanuts, and painfully carried them to the trading station or market —usually

on his head, over a jungle track. And so the world’s supply of peanuts, while constant, was not excessive.

Then cheap machinery began to in vade the wilds of Africa, and in the forefront of the invasion was the Ford truck. It provided methods of trans port that, a generation before, had never been dreamed of. It not only opened up roads —it also brought in labour-saving devices for the use of the native agriculturist. The world pro duction of peanuts, in a few years, in creased five-fold. In the same period, the world’s annual production of copra went from about 300,000 tons to 800,000 tons, while the production of soya beans, and whale oil (the other com petitors of copra) was also vastly in creased But, according to Mr. Wilson’s argu ment, the main factor in the world’s inability to absorb the huge annual production of copra has been the de velopment of the peanut industry; and it is the enormous output of cheap American machinery, typified in the Ford Car, which has brought this about.

So one more world-wide change is written to the debit of “Liz.”