Foreign News: In the Bag

South Africa's Jim Crow laws discriminate against the country's 300,000 East Indians as well as its 8,000,000 Negroes. India has found a simple way to retaliate. It simply clamped an embargo on all exports to South Africa, including jute bags, in which India has a near world monopoly. South Africa uses 15,000 tons of bags every year for packaging its crops. Negroes and poor whites use them as beds, blankets, carpets and doormats. Now old bags are being patched like tire tubes. A farmer who clothed his Negro laborers in jute, with holes cut for head, arms and legs, was fined not for underpaying and ill-treating his help, but for destroying bags. In desperation, the Malan government went to the black market.

The government has paid more than $25 million this year to buy gunny sacks in Europe, then handed them out at a loss to South African farmers, who must return them for reuse. Last week came the unkindest blow of all. Shamefacedly Economic Affairs Minister Eric Louw told the South African Parliament that one European black-marketeer, working through a Swiss bank and with a forged Lloyd's certificate that his bags had been inspected and approved, loaded a million bags aboard a British freighter at Genoa. When the bales were unwrapped at Durban, they proved to be full of rags. The swindler, admitted Minister Louw, got away with $700,000 of the government's money.