Word: bartering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Anybody who goes for barter deals is out of his mind," said Burma's ex-Premier U Nu-and he should know. Burma's Rangoon docks were still overflowing with the bartered Iron Curtain cement it could not use (TIME, May 21). Originally Burma thought that it had at least got a good price for its surplus rice-only to find that the Soviet Union was upping the prices of the goods it sent in exchange. All this was demoralizing enough. Last week Burma came face to face with another unsettling discovery: it really had no surplus rice...
Burma's rice crop turns out to be smaller and the country's potential market bigger than it had calculated. Already losing 10% to 30% of the value of the bartered rice, Burma decided to lower slightly the prices on the rest of the crop. It found itself besieged by cash customers: India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaya. Now Burma faces a frustrating problem: there is not enough exportable rice to supply cash customers and at the same time fulfill barter obligations (600,000 tons a year) to the Iron Curtain countries. Burma has already mortgaged some...
From the copper mines of Sikkim to the oilfields of Assam, Russian traders and technicians traipsed through India last week, offering cut-rate rubles, big-brotherly advice and back-scratching barter deals. Czech engineers mapped roads in the mountainous north. East German technicians scouted sites for India's first raw film factory. In central Bhilai, Russian specialists supervised construction of a steel mill for which Russian moneymen had advanced some $100 million at 2½%, about half the interest rate proposed by Western lenders...
...from U Nu's ruling Socialists. "Interference of the most brazen kind," a top Burmese neutralist called it. The Burmese have also had their business disenchantments with their cynical Communist trading partners. Despite fine promises of the latest machinery and steel, all the Russians ever sent them in barter for their rice was cement-so much cement that all Rangoon could not hold it. and vast quantities of it were ruined on the docks by monsoon rains (TIME, May 21). Most insulting of all, the Russians and Chinese began selling off their Burmese rice in Burma...
...Aided by Britain ($14 million) and the World Bank ($200 million), the U.S. was willing to supply the major part of the capital to finish the mighty three-mile dam. But the offer was left dangling. Nasser, who had mortgaged $200 million worth of cotton not yet planted as barter for Czechoslovakian weapons, occupied himself by recognizing Red China and by planning a trip to Moscow. And when Soviet Minister Dmitri Shepilov visited Cairo last month, Nasser's spokesman whispered that Russia had renewed its offer to finance the dam with a 20-year loan...