Making Hay

For years U.S. advisers had been scolding the Turkish government for trying to expand too far too fast and warning the Turks that they were scaring investors away. Yet last week, as he flew off to a Baghdad Pact meeting in Karachi, tough Premier Adnan Menderes had the look of a man well satisfied with things. As his plane winged eastward, he could look pleasantly down on Anatolia, usually brown, now lushly green. Six weeks of rain had changed the vital wheat crop prospects from poor to good.

Then, too, Turkey's old allies and friends, the Germans, had come back. Representing his fellow Ruhr industrialists, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was taken on a tour of Turkey's mines and factories and lavishly feted. He promised to spend 71 million marks ($17 million) on a new blast furnace that would more than double Turkey's pig-iron production. Excited Turkish newspapers headlined that Krupp "might" also finance a bridge across the Bosporus, "might" build a railway to Iran (he did say that he would be happy to furnish some of the equipment). German willingness to spend in Turkey partly results from Germany's $2 billion gold and dollar balance in the European Payments Union, which can most advantageously be invested in another EPU country.

The Turks' enthusiasm for the Germans and Krupp's enthusiasm for his reception ("like a dream") was tonic to the Menderes administration. Just before leaving for Karachi, Menderes said that he would increase by 33.5% the price the government pays farmers for wheat. Orthodox economists and U.S. advisers were horrified; almost everyone else concluded that the rise was a sign that Menderes intends to call for general elections this fall and is making sure of the farm vote.

Kasim Gulek, leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, criticized the government for not raising wheat prices even more. The Freedom Party's Feridun Ergin pointed an inflationary moral: "This new price will not satisfy the farmers. In 1951 it took 400 kilos of wheat to buy a good suit of clothes. In 1957 it takes 860." Others predicted that the new wheat price increase would have to be financed by printing 60 million to 70 million pounds of new currency, thus further reducing the value of the Turkish pound, which already could be bought for 8-c- U.S. in Istanbul's black market, although its official value was nearly 40-c-.

In Turkey, as in most countries, farmers cast more votes than economists.

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