Word: grains
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week in efforts to smooth out the roller coaster and placate critics. President Ford moved to regulate future U.S.-Russian grain deals. He dispatched a high-level negotiating team to Moscow to try to work out stable, long-term grain purchase agreements; the group is headed by Charles Robinson, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. To allow time for the negotiations, Ford also extended for a month, until Oct. 15, the moratorium imposed last month on additional grain sales by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz...
Minimum Level. The moves are largely political and are aimed most immediately at mollifying big labor. AFL-CIO President George Meany had denounced the grain purchases as part of maintaining a "phony" détente with the Russians. Responding to Ford's announcement, longshoremen called off their boycott of Russian-bound wheat; they had refused to load it, then complied with injunctions ordering them back to work. Ford also gave assurance that negotiations over shipping rates paid by the Russians would go on, to ensure that at least one-third of the grain would be carried in U.S. vessels...
What precise form a long-term agreement will take is uncertain. Most likely it would be similar to the one concluded a few weeks ago with Japan, under which that country committed itself to a certain minimum level of grain purchases-11 million tons annually -over a three-year period. If the Japanese do not need the grain, they will put it into storage to assist in rebuilding seriously depleted world reserves...
...Soviet grain agreement does follow that pattern, its effect in holding down price increases would at best be long-run and indirect. Assurance of a continuing Soviet market might encourage U.S. farmers to plant more crops. Also, building up of a Soviet grain reserve might discourage sudden and inflationary purchases when Russian crops fail. But nothing in the Japanese agreement prohibits additional purchases beyond the agreed minimum, and it is likely that a Soviet agreement would not do so either. Whatever the terms of a U.S.-Soviet arrangement, they are expected to be worked out quickly; talks among lower-level...
...case, the Administration will probably allow the Russians to buy at least an additional 5 million tons of grain this year. That likelihood increased last week when the Department of Agriculture forecast record U.S. harvests of 240 million metric tons for all grains -wheat, corn, oats, barley and rye. That would be 2% less than was forecast in August, but 42 million tons above last year's crop. So, the U.S. should be able to feed itself and export heavily, too -though at how great a cost in added inflation is still unclear...