While these are the conditions under which fish are transported a few miles in this country, we are indebted to a single Cold Storage Company for the privilege of being able to purchase, if we can afford it, fish, meat, game, butter and fruit, imported in refrigerated chambers from Great Britain, the United States, Australia and China.
Briefly, it amounts to this. We can eat foreign fish and foreign fowl but not the fresh produce of Malaya. Hundreds of tons of prime fish are caught every year on the East coast, where the inexhaustible supplies of the China sea are available, but all this fish is dried for export for lack of cold storage transport, though much of it is caught within 24 hours steam of Singapore.
There can be little doubt that the whole future of the perishable food business in this country depends on cold storage, but there is no decided opinion as to the part that the State should take in the development of the trade.
It was realised many years ago, that for sanitary reasons the ordinary shop house was not a suitable place in which fresh meat, fish, etc., could be exposed for sale, and, in the Malay States, the sale of such perishable produce is confined entirely to the markets built by the State.
It would seem, therefore, to be but reasonable and logical for the State to go a step further, and instal cold storage in the markets, and to rent space to the retail dealers in the same way that stalls are rented.
The State owns the railways which run from the coast to the market towns and the installation of refrigerated vans on the railways would appear to be a natural development of a State enterprise, as it is in other countries with State Railways.
This disposes of the problem as far as the Colony and the West Coast States are concerned but the problem on the East coast is quite different.
The development of the States on the East coast has been retarded because they possess no natural ports and harbours which can be entered during the North East monsoon.
Though the deep sea can be fished all through the N. E. Monsoon and steamers run regularly up the East coast to Bangkok and Saigon, no fishing is done because the fishermen live on the mainland. A heavy sea breaks on the shallows and sandbanks which extend from the coast, and dangerous rollers break on the bars which guard the entrance to the rivers.
Further out, in twenty fathoms or so, the seas are regular, and conditions for fishing far better in every way than they are in a strong wind in the English Channel or in the North Sea.
