Grain embargo stalls

It would be comfortable but irresponsible of me if I were to ignore the news that has appeared as the first item on all four television networks during most evenings in the past week.

It is, of course, the hunger strike and death of Bobby Sands. I found myself, in the past year or two, in bewilderment with some of my American friends over their very hazy picture not of the rights and wrongs of the interminable ordeal of Ulster, but over the actual political set-up of Ireland. During the past week, I must say the television reporting, which is what counts, has been eminently fair to all sides not just to the terrorist arms either of the IRA or the Protestants and it's understandable, I suppose, that the demonstrations in cities with large Catholic populations should have been staged by the people who share what they take to be a fighting grievance.

The other night, the British ambassador here, Sir Nicholas Henderson, went on the public, the non-commercial, television network to comment, or as he put it 'to give the totality of the picture' by way of comment on a British-made television programme about the troubles. Through his remarks and the countering remarks of the three or four other sides represented in the programme, it was possible to get at least an enlightened picture but when it's lit up, the picture is no prettier and I'm sorry to say that nobody that I've heard or read seems able to come up with a peaceable solution.

All I can usefully say here is that there is, in a country like this of such vastly varied religious and ethnic groups, there cannot be such a thing as an American reaction and the Reagan administration is treading more gingerly across this minefield than it has done on any other foreign issue.

An American issue which has suddenly been injected with a religious strain came up this week to aggravate the problems the administration is having in finding somewhere to bury or install its MX missiles. This new nuclear system is going to cost several billion dollars. The air force says 33, the general accounting office says 56 – better believe the general accounting office!

It involves over 200 missiles equipped with nuclear warheads and they would be shifted secretly among 4,600 shelters on public lands – that's lands belonging to the United States government. The area over which the government proposes to move them around is about the size of the state of Pennsylvania, which is just less than the size of England.

Where are you going to find such a stretch of country that is relatively unpopulated? Well, the answer is obvious. The Far West has four or five times as much land as that which is scrub or semi-desert or mountain land but the flattest parts, with a population scattered in small towns and hamlets, are to be found in the states of Utah and Nevada. Though both of them are very beautiful to drive across, they have, each of them has, something pretty close to true desert. Nevada, as everyone knows, has been, what you might call by now the 'traditional' testing ground for nuclear explosions. The first was done in the neighbouring state of New Mexico.

Well, the Reagan administration looked over the map and decided that Utah and Nevada were the obvious homes for the MX missiles. Whereupon, this week the Mormons had something to say about it. There are one and a half million people in Utah whose whole area is bigger than the United Kingdom. One million of them are Mormons and when their leader, the president of the Church of Latter Day Saints talks, they listen. He did not, this week, issue what they call 'a revelation' – which is the equivalent of a papal bull or encyclical, a declaration of policy – it was a statement of opposition to the administration's plan and it was wired to the Utah and Nevada members of the Senate and the House and because the protest was made on moral grounds, it will confront them with a tricky conflict between politics and faith.

President Kimball wrote, 'Our fathers came to the West to establish a base from which to carry the gospel of peace to the peoples of the earth. It is ironic and a denial of the very essence of that gospel that in this same general area there should be constructed a mammoth weapons system, potentially capable of destroying much of civilisation.'

Inevitably, the governor of Utah went along with this protest.

The obedience of the Mormons in Congress is not, however, automatic. The Mormon church came out some time ago in opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment known as the ERA amendment which would set down in precise language that no constitutional rights may be impaired or infringed on account of differences in sex.

Incidentally, the 14th Amendment, which has been in existence for more than a hundred years, says in its first article that no state 'shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws'. But 'person' is not definite enough for some people, even for women who insist on being called chairpersons and spokespersons and the Equal Rights Amendment is a very hot American issue. It has not yet got quite enough states to vote for it to allow its being ratified but while the Mormon church seems to have doomed its passage in Utah, there are already protest groups who parade at irregular intervals with signs saying, 'Mormons for ERA'.

Well, it's hard, just now, to imagine what sorts of groups will begin parading in Salt Lake City and other towns bearing banners saying, 'Mormons for the MX missile'. They would be brave people, whereas a lot of sincerity but not much bravery is required of anyone who goes out and chants against war.

Throughout the United States, I dare to say, the people – and they are a majority – who are in favour of the MX missile programme, they don't parade, they don't hold rallies and sing songs. They don't so much applaud the proposed new increases in the military budget, they accept them as a grim or sad necessity. They just pray or hope in the privacy of their homes that the next nuclear energy plant or the new missiles will be planted somewhere else.

Somewhere else! That is the secret slogan of the majority when it comes to accepting an arms arsenal or accepting personal sacrifices. What I have in mind in that last, rather sinister, phrase is the fate of Jimmy Carter's grain embargo.

When it was announced as punishment for the Soviet Union's advance into Afghanistan, it was generally applauded. Some sacrifice had to be made to show the Russians we meant business but not with them. But a big howl went up from the wheat and corn (maize) farmers of Kansas and Missouri. They, too, were willing to make sacrifices but not of the thing they lived by. If the president was going to put the squeeze on the country, let him put it somewhere else.

Well, Mr Reagan, when he was Mr Reagan on the campaign trail, was against the embargo from the start. One of his neater slogans was that the embargo made the American farmer bleed but not the Russians. He promised to lift it when he got in and so, a couple of weeks ago, he said, 'How about now?'.

The surprising thing was the mobilising inside his own political family in the White House of a tough front against him, led by none other than Secretary of State Haig. In fact, one of the first private things that General Haig did when he took office was to beg the president to do nothing about the embargo for three months. Poland was ringed round with Russian and East German and Czechoslovakian forces, the United States was watching and cheering Walesa, the Solidarity leader, and for a week or two Secretary Haig was saying it was uncertain whether or not the Russians were going to move into Poland and subdue the Solidarity movement. This, he said, was the worst possible time to announce to the pinched Russians that now they could have all the grain they wanted.

Well, the Polish situation eased. It eased in the eyes of Washington which were glued on the Russian troop manoeuvres. Mr Reagan said the time had come. There was a ding-dong argument inside the White House. General Haig was against what he regarded as a trivialising of American policy of a new routine in which the United States would be seen shaking one fist and pouring out food with the other. He lost and he announced, as a good soldier and a loyal team player, that he fully supported the president's decision.

The truth seems to be that while it was never true that the Kansas farmers would bleed if they held back their wheat, they are, after all, very handsomely subsidised by the government for not growing more than a certain quota, the truth seems to be that the embargo was failing miserably in its main purpose for, although it deprived the Soviets of a massive supply of wheat and maize, it was nearly compensated for by other great grain countries which either stepped up their exports or paid lip service to the United States by maintaining their present levels of exports and saying to Washington, 'Well, we'll seriously consider reducing them when the next contract comes up'.

And there seemed very little the United States could do about remaining itself an indirect and generous provider of American grain to Russia through the unpluggable loophole of what is called 'trans-shipment'. There is no law which says that a shipment of wheat from the United States bound for, say, Iran or Turkey or Greece or wherever, can not be reshipped from its home port to the Soviet Union.

It is true that Mr Reagan needs some Farm Belt votes for his new economic programme and a new farm bill pending in the Senate but what defeated the embargo was the supplies from other countries and the device of trans-shipment.

I remember an old United Nations hand, the ambassador from a poor Asian country which was, by a law and on paper, the beneficiary of much American foreign aid, most of which he sadly admitted went to crooked shipping firms or rich scamps in his own land or to the representatives waiting at the docks of the black market.

'The curse of foreign aid', he said, 'is the bill of lading.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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