Foreign Aid: A Few Kernels

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Two weeks after President Kennedy gave U.S. traders the go-ahead on grain sales to Communist countries, the Commerce Department authorized the export of 2,600,000 bushels of corn to Hungary. The first sales, involving Minneapolis' Cargill Inc. and Manhattan's Continental Grain Co., amounted to $4,306,860—just a few kernels compared with the $250 million feast that is anticipated when the Communists start buying wheat.

If they start buying, that is. Though Russia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary have indicated that they want 150 million bushels of U.S. wheat in a hurry, some problems remain. A four-man Soviet team headed by First Deputy Foreign Trade Minister Sergei A. Borisov flew into Washington last week to thresh them out. Chief stumbling block is a provision that the President wrote into the deal to help increase its political palatability in the U.S. It requires that the wheat be transported in U.S. ships whenever possible. Since it costs around $20 a ton to move the wheat to Russian ports in U.S. vessels, roughly twice as much as in foreign bottoms, the Russians are anxious to get around that provision. And in Moscow last week, Nikita Khrushchev told a press conference that "if the Americans put forth any kind of discriminatory condition to the sale of wheat, then we will not buy wheat in America."

U.S. officials are confident that some thing can be worked out. For one thing, foreign shipping rates have been rising since the Communists began preempting cargo space for Western wheat. For another, the 400-odd U.S. merchant vessels capable of carrying grain may be nearly all booked up anyway when the Russia-bound wheat is ready to move. In any case, said Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman after a session with the Russians, the situation "looks very promising."