Word: wheated
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From coast to coast, the summer sun is ripening record harvests of wheat, corn, oranges, apples, but, as any American housewife knows only too well, the price for those harvests is inexorably climbing. Overall, the price of food rose 1.2% during July, the government announced last week, pushing the Wholesale Price Index up at a stunning rate (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). Beans, lettuce and other fresh vegetables were up 12% in some areas, while the overall increase in farm products, including hogs and poultry, was 6.6%. The reasons for these increases were intricate, but many Americans focused their anxiety and anger...
...Soviets. While Moscow is hardly remote from any of these events, it is not the main villain. Part of the trouble is that detente, so highly touted by its originators, had aroused unrealistic expectations. On a more down-home level, a number of Americans worry that new wheat sales to the Soviets will bring a rise in U.S. food prices...
...Communist Party's strongest following has traditionally been in the impoverished Alentejo region south of the Tagus River, an area of huge farms owned by absentee landlords. There, tenant sharecroppers and migrant workers barely subsisted producing cork, olives, a few pigs and some wheat. Laborers frequently went hungry in the midst of unworked estates that had been turned into private hunting preserves...
...work, concerned local citizens established in 1969 a federally subsidized training center called Gateway Project. There the clients learn some basic skills. They assemble kits of electric rods for a utility company's field linemen; they reupholster chairs for nearby military bases; they tie together stalks of wheat for a local florist who sells dried flowers by mail. Sometimes they receive the U.S. minimum wage of $2.10 an hour, sometimes as little as 53?. Not much, admits a Gateway official, but "it beats sitting in front of the television all day, which is probably what they would be doing...
Further inflationary surprises may be on the way, though. Most worrisome are the possible price implications of renewed Soviet hunger for U.S. crops. Big purchases of corn, wheat and barley an nounced last week brought the total amount of U.S. grain the Soviets have contracted to buy to 9.8 million metric tons. That is still within the 10 million tons that Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz figures the U.S. can sell with only a minimal impact on domestic prices. But continuing drought in the U.S.S.R. is raising worries that the Soviets might later seek to buy huge additional quantities; at midweek...