Unilever: Public

Benefactor!

It Has a Plan for Eliminating Want

By R. W. Robson

THE mailman played a quaint trick upon me, the other day.

The first letter I opened was from a planter in French Oceania. He sent a cutting from an American newspaper, which reported that, in 1942, the level of net farm income in the United States was the highest in history, and American primary producers had benefited accord ingly.

“Compare this with the lean times the coconut planters are suffering,” wrote our friend. “Is it that our Old Man of the Sea (Unilever) is still riding on the backs of the Islands Sinbads?”

THE very next letter I opened was from another old friend, a resident of London. He is interested in the South Pacific because he has substantial investments in New Guinea coconut plantations.

“I am sending you a copy of London ‘Daily Mail’ of January 22. Knowing your affection for the Unilever mon strosity, I am sure you will be interested in an article on the leader page.”

The “Daily Mail” duly turned up; and there, lavishly displayed, was an article: “One Great Firm’s Plan for a World Without Want.” by an unknown writer named Charles Sutton. It is a hymn of love and thanksgiving, full of praise for the achievements and the plans of Uni lever. I have read the thing two or three times, but it contains no new social or economic panacea. There is merely a superficial sort of argument, urging that “big firms” should refuse to sack staffs in times of slump; such men, it is con tended, should be paid wages while being trained for other work, and the Govern ment should assist by making available funds which have been accumulated in the boom years.

It was the kind of article that is pro duced by hack writers the world over and published conspicuously, to boost some powerful firm or interest. The article appears to be news or views: actually, it is just cunningly disguised propaganda. This may have been quite r genuine effort, made on behalf of Unilever; but, to my eyes, which have seen so many of these ugly things, it had all the marks of the journalistic devil. Front-rank newspapers do not lend themselves to stunts of this kind.

But the “Daily Mail” has fallen a long way since the day of Alfred Harmsworth.

MAYBE I am unduly suspicious. But who would not be suspicious and scornful on discovering Unilever in the guise of economic reformer! Uni lever, one of the most powerful of the international combines; which completely controls all the markets from which it draws its raw materials; which, because it manufactures in 39 different countries, is able to laugh at any Government which seeks to check the rapacity of its buying and selling; Unilever, which for nearly two decades has been daily cursed by every coconut planter in the Pacific!

In pre-Unilever days, copra was ship ped to highly competitive markets, in Europe and elsewhere. The London copra market was one of the liveliest in the world. Buyers from many crushing mills completed there for copra from all over the world. Buyers from many Independent soap and food manufactur

ers competed for coconut oil. Private enterprise then was possible in soap and food manufacturing, copra crushing, copra trading. The copra-producer, wherever he was, benefited from the free operation of the law of supply and demand.

Then came the cunningly-planned, insidious operation which created, first, an international “understanding,” and then the powerful and ruthless combine universally known as Unilever. It com pletely dominates the manufacture and distribution of soap, margarine, and a score of allied commodities in practically every country in the world. It controls the market prices of every vegetable oil, and probably of every competing animal fat, such as tallow and whale oil.

If coconut oil is running short, and the price is rising in favour of the pro ducer, Unilever promptly throws in whale oil or soya bean oil —and down comes the price of coconut oil.

BUT, while the combine, can set all the producers at each other’s throats, it completely controls the price and distribution of its manufactured pro ducts, and can make exactly what profit it fancies. And what profits!

But it is too cunning to make profits out of what might appear a high price to consumers. It keeps its prices just on the hapoy mean where the consumer will not howl, and where they effectively cut out any possible competition; and it makes its huge profits out of extraordin arily efficient methods of mass production ard distribution.

This combine will argue that it is a public benefactor, because its genius for organisation gives the people a wide variety of good commodities at a reason ably low price. (That is a trick of com bines the world over!) It refuses haughtily to even discuss the fact that it has bludgeoned all small competitors —especially “one-man shows” —out of existence: and that it imposes a bread line existence upon tens of thousands of primary producers all over the world.

WHEN I was in London, in 1930, I made a personal investigation of the conditions then governing the copra industry; and I was literally sickened by the evidence I found of the ruthless, growing power of Unilever. I stood, with a broken-down old copra trader, in the empty and abandoned Copra Ex change; I was supplied with the names of brokers who had given up the fight; I was told that the last two independent crushing mills in England had just been absorbed by the combine.

In a series of articles published in this journal, early in 1931, I described what I had found —and what I believed was the future of the coconut planter. It was not a cheerful picture—and every line of it was justified by the events of the next ten years.

The oil-seed producers of the world are helpless in the grip of the Unilever com bine. Their only hope is that, out of this war, there will arise conditions which will make life difficult for combines.

Personally, I do not expect any change.

The combines are too clever. They sense theh danger, and already they are at work on public opinion. The public are to be shown that people who organise com bines are really public benefactors.

Hence, a little propaganda in complaisant journals like the London “Daily Mail.”

The Rev. Susie Rankin who, with hp" husband, was a LMS missionary in Papua, is at present in Melbourne on deputation work. Mr. Rankin will preach at the Collins Street Congregational Church on June 20.