Word: middlemen
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Seeking a scapegoat for high food prices, Nixon has pointed his finger at various unnamed "middlemen." The farmer, he declared, gets only about a third of the U.S. food dollar, while others-presumably packers, truckers, wholesalers, distributors and super-marketeers-swallow the rest. Nixon was being a bit casual with his statistics. In fact, the farmer gets 400 of the food dollar (see chart, page 22). He does even better on relatively unprocessed foods like meat, raw vegetables and fruit. Ranchers pocket about two-thirds of the retail price for beef, which accounted for the biggest chunk of the February...
Chasing Animals. The so-called middlemen undoubtedly have pocketed their share too, and there are a lot of middlemen. In the case of beef, animals are sold by the rancher to a feedlot operator, who fattens stock for several months before selling it to a slaughterhouse. The carcasses are then sold to companies called breakers, which divide the meat into standard cuts and market it to stores...
...that, not many of the middlemen are getting rich. Big packing companies, which traditionally operate on thin profit margins of 21 to 3% on sales, are hurt by the low supply of cattle. Says Sherwood O. Berg, dean of the University of Minnesota's Agriculture Institute: "Right now meat packers are operating under capacity. They are chasing animals to keep their manned production lines going." Nor are supermarkets in very good shape. At Chicago's Jewel Food Stores, the profit margin has slipped slightly since Phase II began. The huge A. & P. chain lost money last year...
...million. Now the oil comes from close at hand-some small amounts from the Sinai, some from Iran, and some, according to angry Arab nationalists, even from Saudi Arabia, on the sly. Today the boycott costs Israel up to $10 million a year, paid out in commissions to middlemen representing firms that will not deal directly with Israel. But that figure is hardly significant compared with Israel's annual outlay of $1.7 billion for imports...
...number of enterprising U.S. middlemen, some of whom operate out of Texas, have been in touch with Peking about arranging sales of 727s. Jetliners and other high-technology products are still on a list of goods forbidden by the U.S. Government for export to China. But a new list-now being drafted jointly by the Departments of State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce and Agriculture-is expected to be more permissive...