Beachhead on the Plate

The S.S. Mormacwave, with Plimsoll marks awash, was warped gingerly into Dock C of Buenos Aires' Puerto Nuevo, and the longshoremen went to work on her. For the riches in her hold, her captain carried 1,700 manifests. His ship, 16 days out of New York, was crammed with machines, parts, motors, industrial tools, tinware, reinforcing bars, steel beams, yarn, toys, dental equipment, books, refrigerators full of penicillin.

All down the quayside, as unloading began, huge cranes bit into the piles of U.S. goods flowing into Argentina. So great was the jam of U.S. crates that port authorities last week ordered freighters following the Mormacwave to lie in the roadstead till the docks were partly cleared.

Perhaps nowhere else in the world could U.S. traders find so much ready cash. Argentina wanted iron, steel, automobiles, wood products, fuels, textiles, and diesel locomotives--and only the U.S. could supply them. U.S. sales had rocketed to $166,000,000 last year, four times as high as in 1945. No figures were out for this year's first quarter, but B.A. experts reckoned that 1947 U.S. sales would zoom a further 30%.

Sellers' Market. How permanent was all this? Had the Yanks muscled in on what had been almost a British preserve? Britain's exports to Argentina last year, delivered at great sacrifice to her war-crippled economy, amounted to less than a third of what Argentina bought from the U.S. Buenos Aires' famed British colony had shrunk to 8,000. Last February's sale of British-owned railways had wiped out the most powerful British business stronghold in the Western Hemisphere.

Americans in Buenos Aires busily pushed cultural schemes, such as a program to send more students northward each year. Others worked to further the unspectacular but steady growth of Argentine exports to the U.S. But as long as the U.S. maintained its foot-&-mouth disease ban on cattle and the Mediterranean fly ban on fruit, and as long as the U.S. kept growing the same farm products as Argentina, there would be a limit to the boom.

An Englishman counseled the long (if partisan) view: "It isn't just you, old boy," he explained, "and it isn't the Good Neighbor policy. This is a sellers' market. . . . There is no sentiment involved. They'll buy wherever it suits them best in terms of price and delivery. If all things were equal, as they must be again some day, they'll buy where they can sell the most of their goods. That, of course, means Britain."

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