THE SUPPLEMENT TO THE 



Tropical Agriculturist and Magazine of the 0. A. 8. 



Compiled and Edited by- A. M. & J. FERGUSON. 



No. 1.] 



JULY, 1911. 



[Vol. IX. 



CEYLON'S PALM PRODUCTS. 



THE HALF YKAR'S RECORD. 

 Is a Boom Coming? 



The year, as regards palm products, has, so far, 

 been a very remarkable one. When oil and copra 

 prices began to fall, from the highest point ever 

 reached, this began to help the desiccating mills, 

 which have now, twice in their history, been 

 able to compete with the all-powerful copra 

 man in securing nuts. 



Take Oil first. This seemed rivetted at £36 

 per ton in London for months, and only towards 

 the end of the second quarter did it rise to £38. 

 The demand for our oil must have been poor. 

 This, some in tho trade put down to the new 

 love, Soya bean. However that may be, 

 the fact remains that there was a consider- 

 able falling off in export up to 30th June of no 

 less than 82,463 cwts., as compared with the 

 same date last year. The lower price paid 

 for oil certainly pointed to either the soap- 

 makers going slow, or to their striking other 

 and cheaper oils, that of the soya bean being 

 probably cue of them. Crushing has, however, 

 gone on very briskly in most of our local 

 oil mills. 



The depressed price of oil reflected on Copra, 

 resulting in a fall of no less than 26£ rupees per 

 candy. The lowest price Estate Copra fetched 

 was about Rs. 67. With oil at £36 in London, 

 driers could not pay the pi-ice the mills were able 

 to, so that Desiccating Mills in some districts were 

 actually flooded with nuts. It paid the copra 

 men better to send their nuts to mills rather 

 than to dry them. We had sent away to date only 

 147,189 caudies against 310,668 candies last year, 

 or 163,479 candies less. Today copra stands at 

 over Rs. 76 50 a candy in Colombo. It may, how- 

 ever, go higher, after our big nut crops are over, 

 say, at the end of August. Then, from all we 

 can gather, nuts, are to be very scarce. They 

 always are in the last quarter, but particularly so 

 10 



will this be the case this year. Then copra drying 

 will be sure to fall off- The high price of copra 

 we understand caused a considerable falling 

 off in the manufacture of coconut butter, or 

 Palrain, last year in Europe. This, no doubt, 

 had something to do with the poorer demand 

 for our copra, the price of which was bound to 

 give way, we think. Our shipments of copra this 

 year will probably look very small as compared 

 with those from the American Colony, the 

 Philippine Islands, with its huge export of copra, 

 and little or no oil. If, however, we add the nuts 

 which we convert into copra, as also those we 

 annually turn into over 28,000,000 lb. of Desic- 

 cated, not forgetting our nuts in shell — some 

 16,000,000--exported, we fancy the Philippine 

 total annual nut crop would not show up so 

 well. The effect would be greater if we could 

 calculate our local consumption of nuts, though, 

 to be sure, the Filipinos consume nuts too. 



As regards Desiccated, the year opened with 

 23 to 24 cents for this, very fair prices considering 

 the very high price and the scarcity of nuts. 

 But still, with better crops, and slightly 

 cheaper nuts, mills did much more work in the 

 second quarter. Some of our Desiccating Mills 

 had to shut down, while others went very 

 slow, owing to continuous drought and very 

 great scarcity of water, while nuts came tumb- 

 ling in in greater quantity than they could cope 

 with. Fortunately sugar was cheap over the 

 period, and, that, together with June being 

 Coronation month, of course, meant that con- 

 fectionery, cakes and biscuits had to be made 

 in unusually large quantities to help to 

 feed the great London multitude. Opto Juno 

 29th we shipped no less than 11,438,925 lb. 

 against 9,893,415 lb. in the first half of last 

 year or /J million lb. in excess ; the price now 

 stands at 22^ cents to 23 cents Colombo delivery. 



There is a falling oft" in Poonac, strange to 

 say, of over 50 per cent. This can, we think, 

 only be accounted for by the very high price of it, 



