Word: wheat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three businessmen bought a big milling plant from the Pillsbury Co. for $550,000, and the deserted 98-ft.-high silos, which once stored a million bushels of wheat, were part of the deal. At first they seemed a problem. "We thought of uses for all the buildings but-the silos," recalls Joseph D. Travis Jr., 48, "and we knew they would be expensive to pull down." Then Travis, remembering reports of California's flourishing singles colonies, suggested to his partners, William C. Erwin Jr. and James E. Kavanaugh, that they could turn the silos into apartments...
...major reason for the glut is bumper crops resulting from good weather. On top of that, the major exporting nations, except the U.S., have expanded their wheat acreage. In Australia, for example, the amount of farm land devoted to wheat has doubled in the last five years. Improved technology and a new high-yield strain of dwarf wheat have greatly reduced the annual import needs of food-shy India and Pakistan. Both countries now expect to become self-sufficient in wheat production by the mid-1970s...
...Storage. The emergence of new exporting nations makes the price of wheat more sensitive than ever to the harsh pressures of supply and demand. In 1961, when the world wheat glut reached a record 1 billion bushels, the surplus consisted exclusively of U.S. and Canadian produce stored at North American facilities. Today, surpluses are also piled high in Australia, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and Common Market countries. Most of the new exporters lack both the storage capacity and the inclination to retain their surpluses in order to stabilize world prices. As a result, the 1968 International Grains Arrangement, which...
...pact placed a price floor of $1.73 a bushel on wheat traded internationally, as against the U.S. domestic support price of $1.25 a bushel. As the negotiators ought to have foreseen, the high world price encouraged overproduction, some of it abetted by large Government subsidies. Price cutting broke out late last year. The U.S. in mid-July cut its export wheat prices by 120 a bushel, to $1.55. At that point, the price war began in earnest...
Washington fears that the U.S. will soon be forced to make further price cuts in order to hang on to its traditional 40% share of the shrinking world market for wheat. If so, the chief losers will be U.S. taxpayers because more farmers will elect to unload their crop at the domestic subsidized price and the Government will have to pay the cost of storage until the wheat can be sold. The problem is likely to prove persistent. U.S. farm experts figure that the world supply of wheat has grown so large that even a serious drought...