"Present food prices are not to be accounted for largely on the basis of heavy exports. Exports of beef, canned, fresh, and pickled, for example, have been less for 1919 than in the previous year, the quantity amounting to 23,499,000 pounds in May, 1919, as compared with 82,787,000 pounds in May, 1918. The May figures for exports of hog products show 125,937,000 pounds in 1919, as against 201,279,000 pounds in May, 1918. The monthly exports of beef and pork show a declining tendency during the first five months of 1919, contrary to the tendency in 1918, the total amounting to 1,090,000,000 pounds in 1919, as against 1,122,000,000 pounds for the corresponding period of 1918—less than the amount of all meats in cold storage on July 1, 1919, which was 1,336,000,000 pounds."
Concerning storage the same report states that:
"Even the fact that the report of goods in cold storage shows an increase of over 9 per cent. in the quantity of all meats held on July 1, 1919 (1,336,000,000 pounds), as compared with the figures for July 1, 1918, is, though very important, not a matter of significance for any considerable period of time. Storage poultry July 1, 1919, was 48,895,704 pounds, or 181 per cent. above last year; cheese, about 25 per cent.; butter, about 75 per cent.; and eggs, about 25 per cent. above July 1 last year. There was a decrease of frozen fish of about 13 per cent. from last year. Taken in connection with the evidence of relatively abundant reserves of live animals and large crops for the current year, it would seem that some relief from high prices of food should be possible."
WHY FOOD PRICES WERE HIGH
The explanation of the post-war high prices of food is given as follows:
"It is true that food is, by comparison, plentiful. But it is also true that money or other circulating medium is unprecedently plentiful. The fact that food prices are relatively high and that the prices of chemicals, metals, lumber, etc., are relatively low, though their supply is relatively small, may be due to a concentration of purchasing power upon food, and the general direction of the flow of currency toward the purchase of immediate consumables. Some relatively minor luxuries such as jewelry (and perhaps automobiles should also be included here as the semi-luxury of greater magnitude) find favor with purchasers, but the main trend of purchase seems to bear toward demand for the necessities of life now in a finished state or nearly so, with a relatively weaker tendency toward demand of capital goods. If the supply, and also the production, of raw materials has been relatively small, and if the prices at which they have exchanged have also been relatively low, it seems obvious that the proportionate amount of currency and credit engaged in their purchase must be abnormally small, thus accounting for the ability of the producers and purveyors of food to demand abnormally high prices regardless of the relative plentifulness of their goods."
CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO PROFITEERING
"The conditions just described are highly favorable to both speculative profiteering and wasteful distribution, through the intervention of supernumerary middlemen and caterers. In fact, the statistics published by the New York Industrial Relations Commission seem to indicate an unusually large increase of persons engaging in certain kinds of salesmanship after the armistice. It should, however, be remembered that even though it may smack of profiteering to produce a very large crop and sell it at abnormally high prices, this is a kind of profiteering which deserves unstinted praise as compared with that other species of profiteering which deliberately reduces output in the expectation that the extortionate prices which the reduced product will command may more than make up to the producer or speculator for the portion of production withheld or the percentage of hoarded goods condemned to spoil and be lost to the nation."
OTHER COMMODITIES
The price of commodities other than foodstuffs was influenced in 1919 by the inadequacy of supply and the curtailment of production. This was especially true of woolens, as stated by the Council: