Making the Fats Go Round
The Chairman's speech at the annual general meeting of Lever Brothers and Unilever provides an example of the resilience of big business. Mr. Geoffrey Heyworth in a masterly review of the world situation of oils and fats, pointed out the reasons for a world deficit of 4,000,000 tons in 1947, underlined the particular difficulties of Western European buyers, and put forward a practical programme for overcoming those difficulties. He pointed out that the present inflated world prices could undoubtedly be reduced by combined buying by the Western European countries, that there are various ways in which production can be immediately increased including an emergency suspension of the limitation on whale catching, and that there is every reason to concentrate production in the under-employed plants of Britain and Holland rather than to hasten re-building in Germany. There can be po doubt that when competition for the small margin of available supplies leads to Britain paying for the last to per cent, of her supplies at a price three times higher than that of the first 90 per cent., some restriction of buying is necessary. It could be achieved by a small reduction in the fat ration, by the abolition of the subsidy, and by ordinary market acumen. A cynic might say that some (though by no means all) of Mr. Heyworth's policies are not inconsistent with the better-known restrictive prac- tices of international cartels, but the fact remains that at the present time they hlappen to accord with common sense.
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