Word: sugar
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...wheat to spare-particularly the U. S., which was blessed with a bumper crop in 1914-suddenly discovered themselves in a strong seller's market, with the price per bushel rising from 85? in July to $1.28 in December. Rye went up; so did lard; so did sugar. But no general inflation of prices occurred immediately. It was as if someone had turned on a strange magnetic current which attracted certain commodities, repelled others...
Among commodities that rose in price were most of the metals. Copper soared from 13? a pound in early 1914 to 35? in 1917. But as wheat, sugar and copper went up, cotton (little of which was used for gun cotton) fell from 13? a pound to 8? in six months. Coffee and tobacco followed the price pattern set by cotton. Cotton piled up in U. S. warehouses, coffee clogged the docks of Santos in Brazil...
Spain, comfortably distant from the sound of guns, profited enormously from high prices and increased production of grain, olive oil, beet sugar. Shipping companies made killings. But by strengthening the industrial and financial power of the Basques and the Catalans, who were separatist in their politics, this war prosperity helped to undermine the monarchy. Spanish laborers drifted over the Pyrenees to France to work for war-time wages and sent money home. Yet with ownership of land and capital heavily concentrated in a few hands, peasants and stay-at-home workers failed to share in war profits...
Brazil's coffee and rubber business went to pot. She made an enforced about-face and began to export kidney beans, sugar, beef, manganese. Before the end of the War her foreign trade had contracted 22% in dollar volume and 46% in physical volume but she had an export balance of $70,000,000 to $100,000,000 a year...
Cuba had a similar experience. England no longer wanted her Havana cigars but it wanted her sugar as never before. France and Belgium had once raised their own sugar beets, and England had bought considerable sugar from Germany in the pre-War period. To supply these markets, Cuban production jumped from 10% of the annual world supply to 25%. Havana blossomed out as a boom city, its real-estate prices spiraling dizzily. All through eastern Cuba woodcutters cleared thousands of acres of forest. Negroes from Haiti and coolies from China planted sugar cane between blackened tree stumps. To move...