Copra

The Future Of

Views of a Practical Planter

Letter to the Editor STATEMENTS in the “PIM” in recent months give the impression that the big firms have solved the problem marketing South Pacific copra, and that the Islands producer may once again look his creditors in the face.

However true this rosy picture may be of other parts of the Pacific Islands it certainly is not true of this important copra centre of the Solomons. Here, gloom and depression prevail as they have prevailed since the general buying u copra was closed down upon by the firms” about 16 months ago. .It is far too often assumed that because there is a market for hot-air conra that the marketing problem is solved This ignores the fact that the majoritv of the small European producers and all the native producers, representing to gether about one-third of this Group’s total copra output, make only smoked copra, which they are unable to sell. As this section of the community has to bear its share of taxation, it is about time something was done to help them.

It is all very well talking about switch ing over from “smoked” to “hot air”, but the conversion requires money in the case of the Europeans, and money and experience in the case of the natives— and after almost a decade of low copra prices and depression, money is precisely the one thing those folk do not possess.

So what?

When the Australian butter producer was m a somewhat analogous position (when asked to switch over from butter making to cheese-making recently), Gov ernment financial assistance was neces sary to assist in the transition. So if “hot air” copra is to be the onlv future marketable grade similar assistance will be reauired here by the producers of smoked copra.

After thirty years' experience in pro ducing copra, this writer remains uncon vinced that the outlook for “smoked” is as black as “the firms” would have us believe. I have been through three major depressions in the copra industry; and m every one. the Jeremiahs of “the firms” informed us that “smoked” was “finished”

“couldn’t sell it”, “never would be able to sell it again”, etc. Yet no sooner did the depression nass than the same firms were hungrv to buy all the “smoked” they could lay their hands upon. As late as January, 1937, “smoked” copra shot up to £2O a ton in Gizo.

The fact seems to remain that “smoked” conra is a definite factor in the world °]l market, and will continue so. This view seems to be sunported by your men tion (“PIM” September. 1941), that Lever’s mav erect a mill to handle 40,000 tons of low grade conra p.a. We also remember being told bv those “in the know” that as much, if not more, oil was crushed from smoked copra than from anv other grade.

We were also told that hydrogenation was responsible for the collapse in copra prices of all grades because that process purified cheaper and foul-smelling oils, like whale oil. and enabled them to com pete successfully with coconut oil. When we asked whv this magical sweetening process of hydrogenation could not be apnlied to what was described as “un palatable smoked copra”, we received no answer.

Further, we remember seeing the price for the despised, “unsaleable” smoked copra close up to within a few shillings of the aristocratic “hot air” copra. So

what have you? Finally, we have the matter of sundried (a pure product if ever there was one) being deposed by “hot air” in the ranking list.

The local industry's major need would appear to be—information. At present, we are dependent for most, if not all, of our information about the technical side (ie. copra’s industrial uses) of our product upon the people most interested in buying it. This state of affairs, so far as I know, rules in no other major in dustry. Until Pacific producers have the same knowledge about their product and its uses as, say, the Australian grazier has about wool, then for so long shall they continue to be the sport of combines who exploit them.

Knowledge is power. Planters’ organ isations, where strong and well-established (which, unfortunately, is not and cannot be the case in the Solomons) should direct some of their activities in this direction, while the Pacific Administrations should do all in their power to assist. The latter have their responsibilities to the native producers, so cannot “pass the buck” in definitely—or continue to take the usual course of turning for advice in every ex tremity to the big firms, whose interests are not necessarily those of the producers, native or white.

I am, etc.,

Leslie F. Gill.

Gizo, BSI, 8/11/1941.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This interesting letter was delayed somewhere in transit, and arrived in Sydney late in January, simultaneously with Mr. Gill—who has been driven out of the Solomons by the Japanese invasion. He faces, with a characteristic grin, the prospect of the loss of a lifetime of work—and has gone off to Melbourne to “look for a war job”.

Mr Gill’s letter raises the whole ques tion of the future of the copra industry.

When the Asiatic hordes have been driven away and peace returns to the South Pacific the copra industry must be very seribusly reviewed, with a view to giving protection to the small, individual planter.

For a quarter-century, he has been in creasingly the victim of conditions arising out of the democracies’ inability to con trol international combines. If individ ualism is to survive in the post-war world, there must be great changes; and, among those changes, the “free planter” may be restored to independence.