Cook Is. Copra

Group Booms Under High Prices

From Our Own Correspondent

Rarotonga, Feb. 8.

THE increase in value of copra has brightened the immediate future of planters in the Cook Islands. The price on the beach at Rarotonga is now lid. per lb. (£l4 per ton) being reduced in the outer islands in proportion to extra freight costs.

The Cook Islands Administration recently banned further export of coco nuts to the New Zealand market with a view to increasing local copra production, and one firm is accommodating the small planter by buying nuts at a flat rate of 5/- a hundred, and thus centralising actual manufacture.

Although production for the whole of the Cook Islands would at present prob ably not exceed 1,000 tons a year, the extra income available to the “coconuts and fish” atolls of Palmerston, Raka hanga, Manihiki, Penrhyn and Puka Puka will be a godsend. These islands have existed financially for the past five years on the meagre exports of pearls, native hats and dried fish.

Two of the loneliest little islands in the Eastern Pacific, Nassau in the Northern Cooks and Manuae in the Hervey Group, are privately-owned coconut plantations, which must have been unprofitable for some years.

By an extraordinary economic process Copra is King again—but for how long?