Grain export boycott

You know how it is when you come across a word that you've never heard or seen before and then you see it ten times in the next week? Well, I had an odd experience this week which I put down to the long arm of coincidence and which I will let others attribute to extrasensory perception.

The other morning I was reading the opening scene of Shakespeare's 'Coriolanus', which starts with a riot in a Roman street over the inflated price of wheat, which was not so academic a motive because when Shakespeare wrote the play, several sorts of mischief combined to stir up a good deal of unrest in England on the same ground – a succession of droughts, a scant corn crop had boosted prices, not to mention some suspicious deals between landowners and shippers. 

Well, the scene opens with an angry rabble armed with staves and clubs and they're out looking for the patrician leader they take to be responsible for their empty bellies. Their spokesman, identified as First Citizen, puts the case against the rich with almost Marxian severity, 'We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us: if they would yield us but the superfluity, while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear: the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance; our suffering is a gain to them. They never cared for us, they suffer us to famish and their store-houses crammed with grain; they make edicts for usury to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us.' 

I'd got a little farther than that when there was a plumping sound outside my kitchen door and I went and there on the mat was the New York Times. On the first page of the middle section, where you find the news summary, there's always a quotation of the day. It was a single sentence from the most powerful of American labour leaders, Mr George Meany. It was an interesting, startling variation on Clemenceau's famous line that war is too important to be left to the generals. What Mr Meany said was, 'Foreign policy is too damn important to be left to the Secretary of State.' This was his battle cry by way of approving a boycott which the maritime unions of America have invoked on grain shipments to the Soviet Union. 

This scare goes back to the experience, which is all too well remembered, of the huge 1972 Russian purchases of American grain at what was admitted at the time to be bargain prices. The sale was cheerfully and vaguely represented by the government as a bargain for the American consumer. But the result was a big jump in domestic grain prices which was soon passed on to bread, cereals, eggs, poultry and beef. The monster that sprouted from that ear of corn was something called 'double digit inflation'. In 1973 inflation in food prices went from eight per cent to 12. Mr Meany and six affiliated maritime unions who load the stuff at all ports of the east coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes don't intend to see it happen again. 

This year the Russians are said to expect a shortfall in their 1974 grain crop of 30 million tons and the rumour is that they will put in an order for 15 millions from this country. 'Very simply,' said Mr Meany, standing there in Washington with the longshoremen's leaders, 'we're not going to load any grain to the Soviet Union unless and until a policy is set forth and agreed to that will protect the American consumer and also the American shipping interests. The boycott is meant to apply to all shipments contracted for after 1 July last.' 

Well, there was an immediate outcry from the big farm cooperatives, the head of the American Farm Bureau Federation called the boycott 'a form of piracy and blackmail'. The governor of Kansas – which is to wheat as coal is to Newcastle – called the boycott 'an ill-conceived grandstand play that could have tragic consequences for the wheat producing Midwest and our entire nation.' 

Now, at this point, on that very day, President Ford had the possible misfortune to be bang in the heart of the Midwest speechifying before 20,000 people attending the Iowa State Fair. It could have been worse, he could have been in Kansas. Iowa, on the other hand, is famous for its hogs and I imagine that if he'd promised to ship those hogs to Russia at bargain prices, he would have found some other state fair to attend. It was not, by the way, clear whether Mr Ford was there primarily as the Preisdent of the United States or as a candidate for the presidency in 1976 and this is no longer a frivolous distinction, not since Watergate. The press, indeed, asked him if his visit was presidential since that night 750 loyal Iowa Republicans paid a hundred dollars each to attend a reception for the president at which they were offered lemonade and midget hotdogs on toothpicks. 

The President's press secretary came in nervously to assure everybody that the Republican national committee would pay the whole cost of the president's trip. He added the intriguing thought that Mr Ford's 1976 campaign committee, unlike Mr Nixon's 1972 campaign committee, has not yet been able to hit on a formula for properly distinguishing between the costs of a presidential journey and a political safari. 

Well, before this shirt-sleeved audience in the broiling Iowa heat – and out there in the Midwest and across the prairie the heatwave that flabbergasted Britain is their regular diet between May and October – in such a place before a sweating crowd, squinting in the murderous sun, he began promisingly enough by saying that he'd make a very short speech because if there's one thing Iowa doesn't need in August, it's more hot air. That brought the loudest cheer of the day. 

Then he got into his regulation political stride. His air force jet, he said, had flown that day across vast acres of farmland which constitute perhaps our nation's greatest asset. Cheers. The crops looked fine, he thought and he anticipated a record harvest. He went on to praise the American farmer as a vital part of the nation's diplomacy and, if that was a little obscure, he soon made plain that he was slapping them all on the back for helping with their crops to open the door to 800 million people on the mainland of China and helping improve relations with the Soviets. 

And then, of course, he had to get down to the issue of grain shipments and, having faced it sideways, he now faced it squarely. His audience must have known as well as he did that this year the Russians have bought over four million tons of wheat but also over five million tons of maize which in America is called corn. And the state song of Iowa begins, 'I-O-way, I-O-way, the land where the tall corn grows...' 

Well, said the president, with his chin up and a red, white and blue tie puffing from his chest, the Department of Agriculture had figured that this year the American wheat crop would come in at 60 million tons and the maize/corn crop at 150 million tons. He didn't say it outright but he implied that if the Soviets wanted another five million tons or so of maize, it would be no skin off Iowa's back. However, then came the 'howevers.' 

In spite of the hope of a record harvest, it was too soon to predict the final tally and he asked that American exporters hold on and hold off a while on shipping any more grain to the Soviet Union until the Secretary of Agriculture had decided what the effect would be on the cost of living and the interests of all Americans, farmers and consumers alike. Since this was precisely why Mr George Meany was asking his longshoremen to hold off shipping any grain at all, you must wonder first if the president had already heard of the boycott – he had not – and second, why there is going to be such a storm about shipping grain to Russia. 

Well, the simple truth is that President Ford threw in his precautionary word about not hurting the cost of living as a hedge, whereas Mr Meany knows, or thinks he does, that whatever the Secretary of Agriculture decides, the effect of filling the Russian orders already placed will trigger a new explosion of inflation. 

'Under the administration's policy,' Mr Meany said, 'in the name of détente, we are going to give the Russians an open door to the private grain markets and do it in a way that will cost the American consumers billions of dollars. Our people,' he said, 'are still paying for the huge 1972 sales of grain. And why,' he asked, 'should private interests sell wheat to a state-controlled economy?' That must sound, in some countries, like a bizarre remark to come from the most powerful as well as the most aggressive national labour leader, and then he said his, already famous, sentence about foreign policy and when he was asked if the mountain would have to come to Mohammed, if the government's leaders would have to come to him, he snapped, 'You bet your life!'. 

So far we've talked about this rumpus as an argument solely about whether the Russian sales will or will not saddle Americans with an inflated price for the stuff the Russians bought and for the animals the grain is fed to. But the rumpus will go on rumpussing because Mr Meany pays no heed at all to the main argument of the president which is that the United States very seriously needs the cash from the Russian exports to pay for its own imports. 

In 1974, American farm exports brought in $12 billion of net earnings from international trade. If, the president told the Iowa crowd, if that $12 billions of foreign exchange income were erased, we would have a huge balance of payments deficit, our dollar would be weakened in foreign markets and we'd pay higher prices for the many items we import every day. 

I'm afraid that seems true enough but it's one of the chronic headaches of politicians that they find it almost impossible to dramatise such vague abstractions as balance of payments or export/import controls. On the other hand, you see a ship sail out of New Orleans with a cargo of wheat and then you go to the supermarket and find that a loaf of bread is five cents dearer and you are ready, as the longshoremen are, to set up a furious cheer for Mr Meany's snappy sentence, 'Foreign policy is too damn important to be left to the Secretary of State.' 

You bet your life!

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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