Potatoes and the Unemployed There has been a good deal
of confusion about the action of the Potato Marketing Board in arranging for the sale of potatoes to the unemployed in Bishop Auckland. It is not, as some impetuous critics have suggested, State trading in any shape or form. The Potato Market- ing Board is not part of a State department, but a body representing producers, who have more potatoes on their han is than they can sell in the ordinary way of trade. At the same time in Bishop Auckland, as in other indus- trial centres, there are numbers Of poor and deserving families who want food that they cannot buy. And just as with the cheap milk for the schools, the experiment is being made in Bishop Auckland of putting need and surplus in touch with each other. The farmers sell— admittedly at below the market rate—potatoes that they would not sell at all otherwise. Merchants and retailers- handle—admittedly for lower than their normal remuneration—transactions that they would not handle at all otherwise, and the unemployed buy at a special rate potatoes that they would not buy at all at the market price. The working of the experiment will be watched with great interest. The real difficulty appears to be that it gives an incentive to unemployed consumers to avoid buying at normal prices, and so create a surplu.s which will be available at cut rates later.
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