Word: barter
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Bananas & Barter. Then came an effort to cope with Indonesia's chaotic currency. Since the coup attempt, the rupiah's black-market price has soared from 10,000 for one U.S. dollar to a still-climbing 30,000. Rice prices rocketed from 310 rupiahs per liter last summer to the current high of 2,000 rupiahs. The generals announced that over the next six months, all old rupiahs would be withdrawn from circulation and replaced by new rupiahs at a rate of one new rupiah for each 1,000 old. The move would have limited value, since...
...least reduce the bulk of bank notes Indonesians have had to lug around with them. But far more was needed to revamp the entire price-wage structure and provide incentives to restore production to decaying plantations and mines. Though the peasantry survives happily enough on bananas, breadfruit and barter, few city dwellers today can make ends meet without handouts of rice, free housing and cash from their employers...
...Russians and other Cuba traders were either unwilling or unable to supply machines for industry without a better barter deal, so back to sugar it was. This year the crop is up to 6,000,000 tons-but Castro is still hurting...
...many other countries have found it so easy to grow cane that world sugar prices tumbled from 10½?per lb. last year to a mere 2? last week. With more than half his crop committed to the Soviets under their barter arrangement, Castro will realize at most $130 million on open-market sugar sales this year...
...crash industrialization, Castro has again turned priority effort toward sugar, Cuba's one cash crop. The current harvest has produced a healthy 6,000,000 tons. Trouble is, so much of it (4,800,000 tons) has already been committed-to Russia, Red China and other countries, under barter agreements-that only 800,000 tons are left, after domestic needs, to sell for badly needed foreign exchange...