Anglo-Argentine trade alone has resisted the pressure and disturbances of the twenty-five years' truce. Apart from the £41 millions spent in the Argentine, mainly on the traditional meat and cereals, the outstanding import item now is the £14 millions worth of Venezuelan petroleum, which we purchase either direct from Venezuela or from the refineries in the Dutch West Indies. Our exports to Brazil have dropped to a mere £5 millions, and apart from the Argentine and Uruguay no other republic takes more than £1 million of goods from us. Long past are the days when we supplied all Latin America with coal, iron and steel, railway equipment and machinery. An inordinate proportion of our reduced exports has consisted in recent years of textiles, a very precarious class of goods in view of the rapid rise of local industries. In 1937 this proportion was more than a third in our trade with the Argentine, and was as high as three-quarters in our trade with Colombia. The fact that half our exports to Chile consisted of textiles in 1937 is eloquent not of our success in competing with the protected local i dustry but of our inability to maintain our other exports.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.