Word: jute
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...burlap scare started when Jap warships swooped into the Bay of Bengal, threatened to cut supply lines to India-source of 99% of world jute, from which burlap is made. With U.S. burlap stockpiles down to a bare three months' supply, something had to be done. It was. In March, WPB rated cotton-bagging at A2, only one notch below military cotton cloth. Month later Washington went a step further, forced all heavy-goods cotton mills to put 20-40% of their looms on cotton-bagging...
...from Rangoon, which he already holds, from western Burma, toward which he is driving-threatens the two great jute ports. Calcutta and Chittagong. Chittagong, on the eastern rim of India's coast, has already been partly evacuated. Even without that immediate threat, the shipping shortage itself has cut into jute supplies. Ships from India must carry even more vital products, such as manganese (three-fifths of the world's production is in India and the U.S.S.R., and Russia is now even more remote than India) and mica (essential for electric insulation, 80% of it comes from India). Every...
...normal times, consumes more than 500,000,000 lb. of burlap a year. Bulk foods-grains, raw sugar, coffee, salt, livestock feeds-are bagged in burlap; so are cotton, wool, fertilizers, chemicals, countless industrial products. In wartime it is also needed for sandbags and camouflage fabrics. As raw jute, or as manufactured burlap, 99% of it originates in India, and 85% of that comes from around the steaming Ganges Delta in Bengal Province. In no other part of the world where acceptable jute can be grown has labor been persuaded to process it, for jute must soak in stagnant water...
...Hemisphere has a wealth of fibers. Chief commercial ones are sisal and henequen, which grow more or less prolifically in Yucatan, Cuba, Haiti, other parts of Latin America. Exotic fibers-caroa, guaxima, papoula de Sao Francisco from Brazil, cabuya from Ecuador, pita and fique from Colombia-might replace jute and hemp if they could be produced and processed in sufficient quantity (which would involve new machinery, labor, transportation...
...which grows wild in Cuba, lack the resistance to salt water that makes abacá a naval necessity. Moreover, while it takes only four months to get a usable hemp crop, it takes three years to produce sisal, five to seven years for henequen. And low world prices for jute and abacá have kept Hemisphere acreage...