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Samoa at Geneva : misleading the League of Nations : a commentary on the proceedings of the Permanent Mandates Commission at its thirteenth session held at Geneva in June, 1928

Copra not a Cause of the Crisis

Copra not a Cause of the Crisis.

I heartily approve of maintaining the highest quality possible for Samoan copra. It would be inconsistent for anyone interested in the copra trade to do otherwise. High-quality copra sells easier than low quality, and it is absurd to say that the traders in Samoa resent the efforts of the Administration to improve the quality of copra. If the Administration found it impracticable to maintain that high quality without entering into the copra trade, they should have gone into the matter properly and handled all the native copra. The traders would have resented this, but trading conditions would ultimately have adjusted themselves. As it is, the Administration admits handling only 400 tons in 18 months, although the average annual output is about 12,000 tons!

In none of the complaints, or representations, of the Citizens' Committee, or the Mau, has the handling of copra by the Administration been raised. The merchants at Apia made a complaint in 1927 against interference of the Government in the copra trade, but it was done while I was absent from Samoa. Although the Royal Commission knew that "copra" was "not within the scope of our inquiry," it readily accepted evidence on it. Most of those who gave page 8 evidence against the Government copra scheme have never been members of the Samoan Citizens' Committee, and their evidence was given in the week between the opening of the Royal Commission in Samoa and my arrival there from New Zealand via Sydney. I can prove every word of this to the hilt.

The Mau has not hampered the production of copra in Samoa as much as the foolish policy of the Government. While the Administration was handling native copra, and paying as much as £4 per ton more for it in three or four points inaccessible to the majority of the Samoan producers, the latter have held their copra for months in the hope that the Government would open receiving depots, or that the traders would raise their price. Neither of these events happened, and much of the copra became over-matured and was lost.

It will be seen that if the traders had left the copra trade to the Government it would have been, by now, irretrievably lost and the whole Territory would have suffered. To say that "copra" was one of the causes of the Samoan unrest is all "bunkum." In putting forth the copra trade as an excuse for the high-handed militaristic system which alone was responsible for the unrest in Samoa, the Government has not refrained from denouncing the merchants and traders in Samoa, and particularly myself, as exploiters of the Natives and ambitious agitators.

Many of these unfounded charges dare not be made by other than privileged persons in privileged places. A speech made at a Rotary Club dinner in New Zealand in March, 1927, to the effect that "before the New Zealand occupation, the traders made the natives drunk, bought their copra for £8 per ton, and sold it for £20 per ton, and the Samoans at that time died off like flies" will ever be remembered by the residents of Samoa as an unwarranted attack on them and on the former administration of the Islands.

Before passing on I wish to repeat that, instead of "Copra" having been one of the causes of the unrest, the Government experiment was deliberately launched as a reprisal against the traders for daring openly to ventilate their grievances, and on account of the sympathy shown by them to the Samoans in their bold but justified demands for relief from the oppressive conditions imposed on them by the Administrator.