Word: important
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After floods, typhoons and the wettest summer in 50 years, Japan measured her rice crop last week and found it 2,000,000 tons short. The Ministry of Agriculture's verdict: the worst crop in twelve years. Japan, which even in good years must import rice (mainly from Siam), will be able to buy only about 1,000,000 tons, since prices are so high ($213 a ton) and most rice-surplus countries are lagging behind their prewar production...
Assisted by U.S. dollars and skill, but doing its own hard work and running its Own show, Turkey is increasing its per Capita income 7% per annum, its gross national product 10%. As recently as 1950, Turkey had to import wheat; today she is the No. 4 wheat exporter in the world. In the same three years, Turkey's tractors increased by 900%, farm acreage 25%, mileage of all-weather roads 100%, port capacity 250%, cotton output 300%. Yet these are the people of whom the Bulgar peasant used to say, making the sign of the cross: "No grass...
Barely a week later, Italian finance police picked up a California-born Italian citizen named Walter Rava in a small cafe in Milan. He was arrested for forging an Italian government import certificate for 5,000 tons of Chilean copper. Rava was part of a gang, headed by the Rumanian commercial attache in Bern, Switzerland, which specialized in getting control of strategic materials sent to Europe, supposedly destined for Western European businessmen. Once the goods arrived, they were smuggled behind the Iron Curtain...
Charging that Andorra was reaping commercial benefit from a purely "illusory independence," France set about jamming the station, and sent in technicians to build a new one. The Andorrans promptly slapped a fat import tax on all radio parts. The French countered by charging 1,000 francs for an exit visa for any Frenchman who wished to visit Andorra. Andorrans protested that the French were ruining their tourist trade...
...Southampton one day last week sailed a cargo of six knocked-down British tractors, bound for India. Their builder, David Brown, 50, Britain's third biggest maker of tractors (after Harry Ferguson and Ford), had stolen a march on competitors. Instead of trying to hurdle India's import barriers on foreign goods, he had signed a deal with Bombay's locally owned Mahindra-Mahindra plant to assemble and sell his machines. After the tractors, Brown dispatched a team of instructor technicians to set up a tractor school in India. Before long, he hopes to have Mahindra-Mahindra...