ABSTRACT

In the years before the Second World War, Burma was one of the greatest rice exporters in the intra-Asian rice trade, but it faced inter-Asian competition from Siam and French Indo-China. The Rangoon Gazette and Weekly Budget reveals the crises and concerns of the Burma rice merchants in these years, for there were grave problems in the rice trade in the late 1920s and 1930s, coinciding with world depression This chapter examines the information flow to those in the rice trade. In July the Gazette discussed the May edition of the International Crop Report and Agricultural Statistics published by the Institute of Agriculture in Rome. In retaliation ‘London shippers’ built their own mill at Hamburg, the Allgemeine Reisgesellschaft, followed by another in Breslau in Poland. During the 1914-18 War the Allgemeine Reisgesellschaft properties in Germany were seized by the German authorities, and the British likewise seized the German mills in Burma.