Abstract
THE address "Rebuilding Europe‘s Fat Supplies the Problem and How to Meet It", delivered by the chairman of Lever Brothers and Unilever, Ltd., at the annual general meeting of that company on September 8, has been reprinted, with a graph and a series of statistical appendixes (Pp. 24. Lever Bros, and Unilever, Ltd., London). The survey of pre-war, war-time and post-war supplies leads Mr. G. Heyworth to the conclusion that there is at present an annual world shortage of some four million tons of oils and fats, and although supplies can be increased, the process will be slow. The tendency for producing countries to consume a greater part of their own products, as well as the tendency towards a heavier consumption of milk, particularly in the United States and Great Britain, and the serious decline in the production of oils and fats in Western Europe, are new contributing factors ; and it is estimated that the world production for 1947 will have been about two and a half million tons below the pre-war figure. Allowing for the increase in world population, the gap between supply and demand is too big to permit abandonment of Government controls in either Great Britain or Holland at present ; but the control system in Western Europe can be operated so as to improve the terms of trade by more effective combination in the purchase of raw materials and by the removal of subsidies on the finished products.
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World Supplies of Oils and Fats. Nature 161, 123 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161123a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161123a0