Word: cottons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fleming's figures were underlined in a press conference in Washington where Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson took pride in the fact that his department this fiscal year is selling 7,500,000 bales of surplus cotton abroad v. total U.S. cotton exports last year of 2,200,000 bales. But Benson conceded that the Government will lose $530 million by selling cotton for an average of $115 a bale v. the Government cost...
Actually, said Cottonman Fleming, the Department of Agriculture export program is just plain old-fashioned dumping, and the U.S. has laws to punish other countries who try to do this in the U.S. Now, said Fleming, "by espousing international dumping as the key procedure for liquidation of cotton surpluses, we have initiated a reaction from these principles, back toward an isolationism which, if adopted by other nations, will play havoc with our export markets...
Mule-Power Farms. Moreover, said Fleming, the U.S. is not really selling about half of the exported cotton; it is giving it away or exchanging it for soft currencies or covered by long-term soft loans. He estimated that some $100 million of such losses should be added to the outright subsidy in this year's export program, which he figured out at $536 million. On top of $636 million, he added $150 million in cotton soil-bank payments this year, $80 million in general Agriculture Department expenses for cotton, and $290 million in artificially inflated raw-material costs...
...expensive price-support system, said Fleming, has tended to keep cotton' production in the old, uneconomic mule-power farms of the Southeast, while retarding the natural shift of cotton growing to the low-cost, highly productive tractorized flatland farms of the South and of the irrigated Southwest and West. This keeps cotton prices so high that they provide an umbrella for foreign growers and a powerful incentive for consumers to shift to synthetic fibers. To cure the situation, Fleming advocated gradual reductions in U.S. cotton price-support levels, gradual removal of U.S. acreage controls, and gradual lifting...
Artificial Market. If this is done for the next two or three years, Fleming said, American cotton growers will be able to "feel their way" back into world competition. Making the outlook most encouraging, he said, are two facts. One is the continuing expansion of industry in the old Cotton Belt, which is absorbing farmers freed from the hardscrabble, impoverished existence of old-style farming. The other is the competitive advantage of better mechanization enjoyed by American agriculture over foreign growers. With foreign living standards rising rapidly, aid Fleming, the market for cotton is increasing at the rate...