£Ai20 Per Ton!

BSP's Rice Famine Ends— At a Price

Honiara, June 15.

rHE freighter Les Glieres arrived in Honiara at the end of May from Saigon with 500 tons of ice for the British Solomon Islands Government Trade Scheme.

This rice, which was urgently leeded, will alleviate for the time >eing the serious shortage which ias arisen as a consequence of the Australian Government’s inability o supply the Protectorate’s full luota of rice for 1952.

The rice brought by Les Glieres is selling at £l2O per ton, vhich represents a formidable rise n production costs to the employer )f labour. Attempts to grow rice n the Solomons have so far met vith little success.

These 500 tons of rice from Saigon are expected to solve the Protectorate s rice supply problem dr the next six months. More than 1,000 tons are required annually for lative rations, and only 1,100 tons ;ould be allocated to the Solomons jy the Australian Government this rear owing to a low Australian rice larvest.

Although the cost of the Saigon 'ice is considerably above the con trolled Australian export price, its icquisition was the only alternative to no rice at all, ether normal sources of supply having no rice to Dffer.

Les Glieres, after entering the Protectorate at Honiara proceeded bo Tulagi and unloaded there.

Hatches wete closed from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. as the vessel had arrived from areas in which there is a much larger and more voracious rhinoceros beetle than the variety present in the Solomons.

The Protectorate already has its fair share of coconut pests in Am blypelta cocophaga, the sucking in sect which feeds on young coconuts, damaging them so that they fall before they reach maturity.