Price of Tin

Now that Stuart Symington is pulling out of the RFC (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Bolivians hope that a settlement is at last in sight in their ten-month-long row with the U.S. over the price of tin. Last week Ambassador Ricardo Martinez Vargas had a talk with President Truman, and Dean Acheson declared that it was "extremely important" for agreement to be reached quickly between the two countries.

The issues, so simple when the row started, had become complex. When the Korean war began, the world price of tin shot up from less than 80-c- to almost $2 a Ib. Symington, the official U.S. tin buyer, refused to pay such a gouging price. Since the U.S. takes about half the world's tin, the price fell. 'Bolivian tin men cried ruin, demanded $1.50. Symington offered $1.12.

In the resulting deadlock, the U.S. had to dip into its strategic stockpile, ration tin to industry. Columnist David Lawrence charged Bolivia, in collusion with British-Southeast Asia interests, with "the biggest holdup in the whole field of raw materials," and asserted that its tin owners, "now getting a 100% return on their invested capital, expect even more if the new phases of the blackmail should be successful."

Life & Death. Yet more was involved than exorbitant profits for Bolivian tin magnates. Bolivia depends wholly on tin income. Tin exports provide more than four-fifths of the country's foreign exchange, needed to pay for essential imports, including food. Taxes on tin account for more than half of the government's revenues--and for eight months the companies have been advancing money to the government to keep it going.

The dispute had an acute and unfavorable impact all over Latin America. When RFC policy began to hurt Bolivia, every other one-crop country in the hemisphere felt vicarious pain. Chile worried about copper, Peru about tuna, Venezuela about oil, Uruguay about wool, Cuba about sugar. It was not hard to fan nationalist resentment against the hard Yankee trader. Last week Bolivians canvassed the possibility of charging the U.S. with "economic aggression" under the agreement signed at Bogota in 1948.

Dollars & Influence. Many other Latin American countries thought that was a good idea. The Chilean Chamber of Deputies unanimously voted in favor of calling a Latin American conference "in defense of raw materials." Bogota's El Tiempo cried, "Where is the good will?" Fishing in the troubled waters, Peron's revamped La Prensa sneered at "the Good Neighbor policy that is good only for one neighbor [meaning the U.S.]."

It looked as though most of the sneers and snarls could have been averted by alert U.S. diplomacy. Once Symington made the RFC ruling, the proper business of State, as the agency charged with foreign relations, was to support the ruling, have it withdrawn or work out a compromise that would have saved latino good will as well as supplied U.S. needs.

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