Caledonia

Potato Famine Ends In New Caledonia

From Fred Dunn in Noumea.

Noumea’s housewives looked very much like ants with precious

grains of sugar early in February

as they hurried about town

clutching well-filled string bags

containing pounds and pounds of

the humble potato. i A SPUD famine in New Caledonia of several weeks’ duration had just been relieved by the arrival of a cargo from New Zealand.

For some unknown reason, local imports had been unable to take up the slack between the exhaustion of locally produced stocks and the order ing of stocks from Australia.

A few tons arrived from Australia in the first days of the New Year.

But these were soon gone, and it was not until the arrival of the New Zealand refrigerated vessel Knight Templar that potatoes again became available.

The price was a pleasant surprise to housewives, as they had to pay only 18 francs per kilo (9d. lb) for the New Zealand potatoes, compared with 25 francs per kilo for those from Australia.

Expensive Salads

But if the price of potatoes was pleasing to the housewives, the same cannot be said for lettuces. These have been selling for 140 francs per kilo (about 7/6 lb), and as there are only about two average-size lettuces in a kilo, salads are an expensive item of diet.

Other vegetables have also been scarce and dear. This is not unusual at this time of year, but the position has been aggravated by the current drought and some record high tem peratures in January and early Feb ruary which made gardening dis heartening if not almost impossible.

To overcome the vegetable scarcity, cabbages and other vegetables have been imported from Sydney. • Many records of the Methodist Church in Fiji from the 1840’s to 1945 were recently transferred to the Central Archives in Suva for safe keeping.