What Price Foresight?

Is pepper necessary to the national defense? Manhattan pepper importers went to court last week to challenge the seizure by the War Food Administration of 6 1/2 million pounds of their pepper.

Manhattan warehouses bulge with a three-year supply of pepper, whereas normally U.S. pepper stocks were never larger than a three-month supply. But the shrewd Manhattan pepper importers, foreseeing that a war with Japan would shut off imports, and taking advantage of low pepper prices, bought and bought, before Pearl Harbor. By December 1941 they had 60,000,000 Ib. in storage.

In the last three years black pepper has become scarcer and scarcer; many housewives have difficulty in getting any pepper. The Government acted to force the pepper dealers to release their stocks. The dealers balked: the OPA ceiling price is 6 1/2 a Ib., which they claimed would by no means repay them for the high costs of their foresight--insurance, interest, storage charges in warehouses. To make a small profit they need a ceiling price of at least 10-c- a Ib. (In London the ceiling price is about 20-c- per Ib.)

The pepper controversy posed a neat wartime question: Should the pepper dealers be penalized for their foresight by being forced to sell at inelastic OPA prices? Peppermen thought not, especially since U.S. housewives annually spend only about 35-c- on pepper. But still, the law is the law, in small things as in large. The War Food Administration pressed on to seize the pepper.

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