Foreign Trade: Half-Baked

Despite months of cooking, the great wheat deal between the U.S., Russia and several European Communist countries is still no more than half-baked.

Last week it looked as if it might stay that way. After discussing shipping arrangements with Russian officials in the Black Sea port of Odessa, U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce Clarence D. Martin said: "I suspect they have done their buying for this season."

Under the agreement announced last October by President Kennedy, the U.S. was to have sold 2,500,000 tons of wheat to Russia and another 1,500,000 to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. So far, however, U.S. wheat dealers have managed to sell only half that amount—1,700,000 tons to Russia for some $135 million, and 300,000 tons to the satellites. Eventually, the satellites may buy more wheat, but the Russians claim that their own breadbasket, stocked with some 12 million tons of Western wheat, is full.

Why this sudden loss of interest in U.S. wheat? For one thing, Moscow was taken aback by the long delays in concluding the deal, by last year's acrimonious debate in the U.S. Senate over credit terms, and by the recent nine-day boycott of wheat shipments by U.S. longshoremen to ensure that 50% of the grain would move in U.S. bottoms. But the chief reason appears to be that Moscow has high hopes for a successful wheat crop this year, simply does not need any more wheat for the time being.