Word: barter
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...countryside, where 80% of the population still lives, the ravages of the world's worst chronic inflation are scarcely felt. Most families can grow enough food to get along and often have enough left over to barter for clothes and even bicycles. In the cities, life for most is not so easy. The monthly wage of an average white-collar worker would barely buy a round of drinks in the Hotel Indonesia bar. To make ends meet, city dwellers have invented a sort of guerrilla economy. Almost everyone has a racket...
...full 1,000,000 tons under last year's crop and 1,500,000 tons less than Castro's earlier forecasts. Right now, Cuba can afford a small crop even less than usual. Some 60% of the harvest is pledged to the Soviet Union under a barter arrangement. The rest will have to compete in a glutted world market, where prices have tumbled 12? to 2? per Ib. in the last 30 months. To add to his sugar blues, Castro also faced a desperate shortage of skilled labor to help bring in the crop...
...Gregoire Kayibanda's chief government handicap is even more serious: he has no telephone in his palace in Kigali. Periodically he sends a minister driving off to neighboring Uganda to find out what is happening in the world. Rwanda is, however, progressing; until recently, it had only a barter economy based on cows. National pride also engenders pretensions as well as problems. Impoverished Dahomey boasts a $6,000,000 Presidential residence that is larger than Buckingham Palace. Mauritania has a Directorate of Forests and Waters, though it has no forests and precious little water. Upper Volta refers...
With the British Aircraft Corp. forced out of the competition, Douglas and Boeing were left in the race, with Douglas having the inside track. Still, barter troubles continued. Now the Lebanese asked that surplus U.S. wheat and other foodstuffs be thrown into the deal along with the new jets. To help pay for the costly planes, the Lebanese proposed to raise cash by selling off the wheat and foodstuffs. If that sounded roundabout, it was-but it is the way business is apt to be done with the Middle East...
Castro could not say as much for rice, the staple of every Cuban meal. Mournfully, he disclosed that Red China had broken a $250 million barter agreement-mostly Chinese rice for Cuban sugar. China blamed economic pressures at home, but there was little doubt that Castro's drift toward Moscow was the real reason. "I thought this was a long-term proposition," Castro said, "but the other party did not understand it that way." As a result, the Cuban rice ration was lopped in half-from 6 lbs. a month per person to 3 lbs. Oh, well, shrugged Fidel...