Word: harvester
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This year's poor harvests and rising prices have also hit sugar. Since January, the cost of the sweetener has increased at the supermarket by about 90%, to 88? per lb. Part of the squeeze traces to Eastern Europe, where very heavy spring and summer rains soured the sugar-beet harvest. That has forced both the Soviet Union and Poland to buy heavily in world markets...
Sugar exports from the Western Hemisphere have also declined. Cuba's crop this year was raked by the rust fungus. The Cubans lost about 1 million tons of their 6.5 million-ton-harvest to the disease. As a result, the Castro government has cut its deliveries to the Soviet Union, which normally takes approximately half its crop, by about...
Brazil, Latin America's other big sugar producer, accounts for close to 10% of world output and has enjoyed a good harvest. But sugar in that country is now winding up as an important source of automotive fuel instead of as a sweetener on dinner tables. Brazil has embarked on a crash program to manufacture ethyl-alcohol automobile fuel from sugar cane. And last month, when the Persian Gulf war halted oil shipments from Iraq, which supplies 50% of Brazil's petroleum imports, the government slapped an emergency ban on all new sugar export contracts. The action...
...France is trying to give the embargo the coup de grâce. France, which is Western Europe's leading grain producer, although it is not a major world exporter, has just completed a bumper harvest. The French this year will have 3 million to 4 million tons of wheat available for export. As a member of the European Community, France is bound by a pledge made last winter that it would not take advantage of the American embargo by boosting its own grain exports to the Soviet Union. But now the French government wants the Community to shelve...
...following the disastrous Soviet crop failure in 1972. Grain inventories around the world still provide a modest reserve cushion, and that should stop any serious agricultural shortages during the coming year, when world grain consumption is expected to exceed production by 37 miliion tons. On the other hand, another harvest as bad as this year's, and nations could find themselves facing disturbing shortages...