The £ s. d. Of Selling Copra

By a Staff Writer

The most important thing to be deduced from the report on Fiji’s current copra situation is that Fiji planters are about three years behind other British Pacific territories in thinking that it is a good idea to have more egg-baskets than one. But judging by some of the ideas that are currently circulating in Fiji about copra, it seems evident that local producers have something to learn about selling overseas, too,

QINCE the end of the UK Ministry

° Unilever a {ias * enter

Arm contractsSchvlar wito most sr territories in the South Pacific for a nronortion of their conra nroduc*tioS their copra pr This company would have entered into a similar contract with Fiji; but at the time Fiji producers could nol dWUiev wlXto S reta?n°a g conr S a nothing was done about selling a nmnnrtinn rvf thp codfr overseas° n and it consequently all went to the local mill which has now geared itself to this intake of COpra.

Someone to Make Contracts As has been suggested lately.

Unilever would, no doubt, still be to make an annuai con tract with Fi J i; but there is no authoritative body with whom the company could make such a con

besuchabadth?mr

?fSr n r! oUlCl not be SUcn a bacl tnmg « has also been suggested that *ls difficulty might be got over by operative. But wricitever the body W3<S called, the requirements would be more or less the same. It would need to have a legal status for mak

(Continued on page 146)

ing firm contracts overseas locally, and to have the necessa stores and office accommodation a: personnel for running what is, aft all, a veiy big enterprise.

All Unilever copra is shipped fre South Pacific territories in Ba Line ships. Naturally, these sht would not call at Savusavu or els where for small quantities of copii and this means that consideral' storage space would be necessar: The price paid by Unilever unc its contracts is current Philippini or world, price. And that, presumab; would be the price it would p: for Fiji copra—“ Suva price, better”, wouldn’t come into calcul tions.

The reported £l4 differential kl tween Savusavu price and Suva m price is difficult to break down in component parts. The mill does n buy in outports. but only ex-whaf Suva, and how the producer gc his copra there is his own busine?

Apparently only about £4 of ti

is freight, and the rest comes ;r about 24 other heads ranging l the twine that is used to sew bags to beetle-tax —some items hich might, it seems to us, more erly be included in cost of pro ion. ipra Boards have worked Dthly enough in other Terri is, but Fiji planters would be ng themselves if they imagined planters in these places had no 3. Each board has its own way working and fixing prices that paid producers, as a glance at ’s monthly produce prices will 7.

August, for example, the P-NG :a Marketing Board was paying intative price of £A6S per ton top grade copra at main ports; BSIP Board was paying £A6O top grade; Western Samoa was ng £Stg.67/13/8 per ton. It is □us that the Samoan Board was ng this price from accumulated its (see p. 145) while P-NG, for nple, was merely paying an trary sum, the final amount to djusted at the end of the year’s ing. le only way to compare the 3S paid in various territories is ake them over a long period, bring into consideration such gs as local taxes (some still pay >rt tax on copra), stabilisation 1 deductions and the like.

Difficult Comparisons

1959, when copra boomed, P-NG lucers were consistently paid a tentative price; but when amts were finally adjusted in

April this year, P-NG producers ended with an average price of £A9O/14/7 per ton for top grade over the whole of 1959.

During that same period, PIM quoted the price that the Suva mill was paying in the first week of every month (although the Suva prices were, in fact, adjusted weekly).

Using these figures, the average mill ex-wharf Suva price over 1959 was £F7B/6/5 per ton for top grade— equivalent to approximately £ABB per ton. It seems likely, therefore, that in the long run, P-NG planters did a little better than Fiji planters; but Fiji planters had some advant age in that they were paid the total amount promptly, while in some cases, P-NG planters had to wait nine months for a final settling up.

Charges Vary

The charges involved in shipping copra in bulk from Pacific Islands ports to Northern Europe varies according to the world price of copra. The cost of a 3 per cent, shrinkage when copra is £lOO per ton is naturally more than when copra is £6O; the same rule applies to insurance. However, the current cost of shipping copra from New Guinea (for example) to UK is cer tainly less than the very generous amount allowed for getting Savu savu copra to the wharf in Suva.

For those who like doing sums it is interesting to compare the Fiji and Philippines prices as quoted for August 8, 1960, in the PIM.

On that date the Suva mill was paying £FS7/7/6; the Philippines

c.i.f. North European price was $193.50 —equal to about £F75.5 At a wild guess, say the freight and other charges amounted to around £Fl3 that leaves around £FS per ton more than the mill was paying—not £25, as some people in Fiji seem to have claimed.

These figures, of course, are so full of unknown quantities that they can be regarded as only approxi mate. Nonetheless, where thousands of tons of copra are involved in the aggregate, even a pound or two adds up to a considerable sum.

One factor that is consistently overlooked in the current Fiji copra situation is that the mill, once hav ing extracted the oil from the copra, has to get it across to the other side of the world before it can benefit from it—and this is not done for nothing. World price can swing considerably between the purchase of the copra at Suva wharf and the arrival of the coconut oil in Europe.

The immediate nigger in the wood pile seems to be that large amount of £l4 which producers in Fiji say it costs them to get a ton of copra to Suva. It is a sum in excess of the current cost of getting the same copra in bulk, all the way from the Pacific to Europe, and therefore is a figure that needs investigating.