AGRICULTURE: Battling the Surplus Bulge

Into Bangkok last week to star in an all-cotton fashion show and present two high-style cotton dresses to Thailand’s Queen Sirikit flew the U.S.A.’s 1959 Maid of Cotton, pretty, blue-eyed, brunette Malinda Diggs Berry, 21-year-old Oklahoma State University coed. Like a debutante on a grand tour, Malinda arrived with a chaperone, a pressagent and nine suitcases containing 25 costume changes (including a native dress for each land she would visit). But she had little time to enjoy them. Hardly was she through with her style show when she had to hop a plane to repeat the same act in Tokyo, then on to Osaka, Hong Kong, Manila, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Honolulu and San Francisco.

Oodles of Noodles. Sending out a Maid to dp a salesman’s work is the latest trick of U.S. farmers trying private enterprise methods to sell U.S. crop surpluses. Feed growers are prowling Europe looking for new markets to serve Europe’s growing livestock industry; free samples of U.S. fried chicken, cigarettes and doughnuts are being handed out at trade fairs; Italian spaghetti manufacturers are being shown how to make good pasta with U.S. wheat, instead of their traditional but scarce durum wheat.

One of the most aggressive farm groups in this field has been the Nebraska Wheat Growers Association. Four years ago, alarmed at the loss of overseas markets, the Nebraskans started levying a quarter-cent-a-bushel tax on all the wheat produced and sold in their state. The funds, amplified by foreign counterpart (local currency) funds at the disposal of the Foreign Agricultural Service, were used to run wheat laboratories in Lima and New Delhi to test local grains, in the process show mills what good U.S. wheat grades to order to make more nutritious, more bakable bread. The work went over so well that Colorado and Kansas wheat growers joined in, recently formed the regional Great Plains Wheat Market Development Association, set up another office in Rotterdam.

Quantity v. Quality. One of the big problems is to rebuild confidence in the quality of U.S. wheat. Under the support program, many farmers turned to growing poor-grade grain because the yield was greater than on high-quality wheats. When this was dumped abroad by the Government it turned buyers away from the U.S. On top of this, many a grain man was not above shipping second-grade wheat when top quality was ordered. Two British mills, which were taking 1,000,000 bushels a month, became so disgusted with the poor quality of the wheat that they stopped buying. The Wheat Growers Association persuaded them to start again by promising rigid quality controls on shipments.

Impressed by the wheat campaign, the Grain Sorghum Producers Association of Amarillo decided to spend $30,000 in the next two years to encourage European feed mills and farmers to buy more U.S. coarse grains. The U.S. Rice Export Association of New Orleans invested $35,000 in a market analysis, learned that most European groceries sell rice out of bins; thus the European housewife often does not know whether it will cook up as firm, separate kernels or a gluey mess. One U.S. rice processor, Dallas’ Comet Rice Mills, is now invading European retail stores with brightly boxed, consumer-size-packaged rice, reports promising sales.

Alternative to Subsidy. Such efforts are still small. But enough progress is being made to convince many farmers that a real move away from growing crops to dump on the Government and toward producing what people want to buy could lead to a major expansion of U.S. farm markets abroad.

After samples of fried chicken were passed out at trade fairs in West Germany, U.S. poultrymen got orders for millions of pounds of frozen dressed poultry. When samples of U.S. cigarettes were handed out in Thailand, purchases of cigarettes made from U.S. tobacco jumped from 7,000,000 to 14 million in a month. Lately cotton consumption has risen 12% in France, 11% in West Germany, and 20% in Japan following trade-fair promotions. Industry sources believe the current 5,700,000-bale foreign market can be boosted to 8,000,000. Says the Cotton Council: “If we could get world cotton consumption per capita up to anywhere near U.S. consumption there would be a world cotton shortage.”