The U.S. Objects

Canada's family ties with Britain and her neighborly ties with the U.S. were strained last week. The irritant was wheat, which Canada and the U.S. have to sell and Britain wants to buy.

Mother country Britain and elder daughter Canada planned a tight family deal: Britain would buy an average of 145 million bushels of Canada's wheat annually (37% of this year's expected crop) for the next four years. The price would be $1.55 a bushel. This would ensure Britons cheap bread and Canadians a guaranteed market, although prairie farmers complained bitterly that they were losing millions of dollars. (U.S. farmers were getting $2.16 a bushel.) Nevertheless, Britain's Food Minister John Strachey flew out to Ottawa to sign on the dotted line.

At this point the U.S. stuck its neighborly nose into the deal and raised a loud, bad-neighborly squawk. Washington protested that an exclusive, two-way transaction (at 60-c- a bushel less than the U.S. price) would shut U.S. wheat out of the British market. This did not matter now, but in years of surplus crops it might cost the U.S. farmer plenty. Furthermore, the State Department warned that the British loan, still awaiting House approval, might lose enough votes from the wheat-producing West to be defeated. Britain bowed; Strachey flew home empty handed.

The Deal left everyone resentful. The U.S. was huffed at a projected bilateral deal counter to Washington's cherished plans for free, multilateral trade. (In view of the way the U.S. subsidizes cotton exports and keeps her tariffs up, this often seems hypocritical to other nations.)

Canada too was angry. Without a deal, she will have to take her chances at selling her wheat in the years of world surpluses which will come some day. What added heat to her anger was the fact that she had only wanted to do what the free-trading U.S. is doing with Cuba--i.e., buying her sugar crop at a guaranteed price below the world price. And Britain, which was forced to ration bread last week for the first time in her history, was angry because she will have to pay more for her daily bread.

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