Another Pearl Button

Factory For Fiji

Mr. B. D. Lakshman, Well

known Indian merchant, of Lautoka, Fiji, will shortly open a pearl-button factory there.

It will be recalled that Mr. A. G.

McCown imported machinery from Europe last year and has been turning out buttons from his Levuka factory for some months past.

Reporting this, a Suva newspaper has stated that while the normal price of trochus shell, from which the buttons are being made, is £5O to £6O per ton, “exporting firms have forced the price up to £l6O per ton” recently.

The position, of course, is that the world price of trochus shell has gone up—and naturally world de mand is going to control the price that the Fiji button factories will have to pay for their shell. There is no deliberate effort on the part of exporters to adversely prejudice the price for the local factories, as the report seems to suggest.

On the other hand, there may be a deliberate effort by overseas in terests to offer high prices for Fiji trochus in an effort to put the local button manufacturers out of busi ness, but presumably that even tuality must have been taken into consideration by the Fiji industries before they began business.

How the local industries can be fairly protected from such tactics is difficult to see, as Fiji trochus producers can scarcely be expected to have their prices held down merely to protect a local industry, however worthy that industry is.

It has never been clear how Fiji hoped to compete with Hong Kong, Japan and elsewhere in the world button market.