Jute, Hemp and Bedlam

There is apt to be very little more jute (or burlap, which is made from jute) for the U.S., and no abaca (Manila hemp). Those facts may sound esoteric to the layman, but they have the U.S. Government—and all who know about jute and hemp—in a frenzy.

Burlap is the “wrapping paper of the wholesale trade.” The U.S., even in normal times, consumes more than 500,000,000 lb. of burlap a year. Bulk foods—grains, raw sugar, coffee, salt, livestock feeds—are bagged in burlap; so are cotton, wool, fertilizers, chemicals, countless industrial products. In wartime it is also needed for sandbags and camouflage fabrics. As raw jute, or as manufactured burlap, 99% of it originates in India, and 85% of that comes from around the steaming Ganges Delta in Bengal Province. In no other part of the world where acceptable jute can be grown has labor been persuaded to process it, for jute must soak in stagnant water, must be hand-worked by natives who wade waist-deep in the stinking mess.

The Jap—from Rangoon, which he already holds, from western Burma, toward which he is driving—threatens the two great jute ports. Calcutta and Chittagong. Chittagong, on the eastern rim of India’s coast, has already been partly evacuated. Even without that immediate threat, the shipping shortage itself has cut into jute supplies. Ships from India must carry even more vital products, such as manganese (three-fifths of the world’s production is in India and the U.S.S.R., and Russia is now even more remote than India) and mica (essential for electric insulation, 80% of it comes from India). Every war since the Crimean has created a boom in jute, but this is the first time the Western Hemisphere faced jutelessness.

Since Pearl Harbor, the U.S. has made herculean efforts to conserve burlap, to get in as much more as its thin line of groaning ships can bring. By Government order, two-thirds of all burlap is earmarked for military needs, the other third for essential farm needs. Non-essential users, like carpet and furniture makers, have been denied any burlap at all. Yet U.S. warehouse stocks are now less than a third of consumption in a good year; Calcutta stocks (if the U.S. can get them) are about the same.

Abacá—90% of it from the Philippines (a lot of it from around Davao, one of the first towns the Japs took)—looks like the banana plant (see cut,p. 63) and belongs to the same family. Bananas may grease the ways for a Victory ship launching, but abacá makes the rope for the world’s navies. There has been little abacá since Manila fell, and there will be little if any more till Manila is retaken.

For other cordage, the Hemisphere has a wealth of fibers. Chief commercial ones are sisal and henequen, which grow more or less prolifically in Yucatan, Cuba, Haiti, other parts of Latin America. Exotic fibers—caroa, guaxima, papoula de Sao Francisco from Brazil, cabuya from Ecuador, pita and fique from Colombia—might replace jute and hemp if they could be produced and processed in sufficient quantity (which would involve new machinery, labor, transportation).

But henequen, sisal, and every other known western fiber but sansevieria, which grows wild in Cuba, lack the resistance to salt water that makes abacá a naval necessity. Moreover, while it takes only four months to get a usable hemp crop, it takes three years to produce sisal, five to seven years for henequen. And low world prices for jute and abacá have kept Hemisphere acreage low.

What’s To Be Done? Best substitute for burlap is that lately over-produced U.S. staple—cotton. Since late January, the U.S. Government has been salting away a stockpile of osnaburgs (heavy cotton) by draining off one-third of all production. Hoped for, and far from achieved, total: 200,000,000 yards (one-fifth of normal burlap consumption).

Last fortnight, bag makers got A-2 priorities on cotton bagging but, with all the other demands on cotton mills, the rating so far has turned out to be about as good as Confederate money. Up to now, burlap-starved farmers have got by somehow with emergency allocations, used-bag collections, etc. With mounting cries from bag-starved Lend-Leasers and Good Neighbors, best hope is that such makeshifts—together with stepped-up production of Latin American substitutes—will continue to keep the hand and the mouth connected.

If worst comes to worst, paper wrapping, or wood-packed shipments in bulk, can still substitute for a lot of burlap. But last week, hemp was in such a parlous state that the agricultural fantasy of the century was being seriously pushed in Washington. Commodity Credit Corp. hoped to obtain 240,000,000 lb. of home-grown hemp, 14 times the U.S.’s peak production in World War I. CCC has barely taken its first baby step in the program: persuading U.S. farmers to plant 35,000 acres of hemp for 350,000 bushels of seed. To achieve that goal, the seed for the seed must be in the ground within three weeks.

If and when CCC gets the seed, it must then lure more U.S. farmers to sow it across some 300,000 acres next year, teach them how to grow and harvest it. (But CCC knows of only ten people in all the U.S. who are fully versed in the sensitive art of harvesting hemp: cut too early, the fiber is weak, cut too late, it is damaged.) Thereafter, materials must somehow be found to build 100 processing plants near the new hemp fields, men must be trained to staff them.

If that program sounds impossible, CCC can point out that having no rope for the U.S. Navy (which normally scorns U.S. hemp) is still more unthinkable.

Because it thinks Congress will eventually swallow most of Treasury Secretary Morgenthau’s newest tax proposals, giant Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. has jumped the gun, is already whacking off Federal income taxes at so high a rate that, while January & February sales rose sharply, net profits were shown as only $2,498,000 (78¢ a common share) against $3,572,000 a year ago ($1.33 a share).