Too Little?

Is a tobacco shortage imminent? From the rich, leaf-growing lands of the south, a thick smoke screen, pungent with reports of short crop and runaway prices, swirled up around the tobacco industry last week. Over the radio, cigaret programs vaguely hinted at a shrinking supply. Newspaper ads pleaded for patience if favorite brands were temporarily exhausted. To ration-wise citizens, all this spelled shortage. But what was behind the smoke?

Lots of Smoke. In Virginia's famed Old Belt markets, tobacco companies are scrambling to buy all the leaf they can get. Although hobbled by price ceilings and individual War Food Administration quotas, they have sent prices flipping up like a snapped butt. Low-grade leaf, once worth only a cent a pound, now brings up to 30-c-. Second-growth "wisps," which growers once did not even bother to cart to market, now find ready buyers. Flue-cured tobacco, mainstay of the industry, is up to 40-c- a pound, almost double the 1933-41 average.

In Kentucky, where 70% of the trade's burley tobacco is grown, a late, wet spring impeded planting, and a dry summer stunted growth. The two bad seasons knocked 25,000,000 lb. off the crop, dropped it some 10 to 15% below last year's bumper harvest. In North Carolina, where 36% of all U.S. tobacco is raised, the story was the same. In the richly odorous curing barns, dopesters whispered that perhaps manufacturers might start rationing retailers.

The Commerce Department reported a boom in domestic tax-paid consumption, 180,000,000,000 cigarets in 1940 to an estimated 300,000,000,000 this, year, with tax-free exports, Lend-Lease and cigarets for the armed forces adding to demand. The department noted that manufacturers had already dipped into their 1944 and 1945 supply (curing requires two or three years). Adding this all up, the Commerce Department concluded: there will be a shortage of cigarets in 1944.

But No Fire. But tobacco-wise War Food Administration officials found no fire behind the smoke. Their own facts: before this year's harvest, the tobacco industry had on hand 1,378,782,000 lb. of tobacco, enough for two years' normal demand. The quick-burning war demand in 1944 will force manufacturers to dip heavily into this hoard, but will still leave them with more than 20 months' supply. While they customarily cure tobacco 24 to 30 months, they could use tobacco cured only 18 months in a pinch, with no harm to the U.S. throat. (The British use tobacco cured for only a year.) Despite heavy Lend-Lease requirements, total U.S. exports are down 4.5% from prewar years.

Behind the scary shortage talk some officials saw a shrewd attempt by the manufacturers to knock out crop control of tobacco, probably the only crop which will be restricted next year. By & large, growers back crop control even now, fearing a swamped market and depressed prices in the postwar years, and there is grave doubt whether knocking off all quotas would materially increase planting. Acreage allotments have been steadily upped for three years, including a 20% hop for next year, but manpower and fertilizer shortages have kept plantings below quotas.

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