Economic Tragedy

The days of America's peacetime foreign trade were not just nostalgic memory to the 1,200 foreign traders who gathered in Boston last week for the meeting of the National Foreign Trade Council. For them, the present represents nothing but grim economic tragedy.

On paper U.S. exports look good: 1942's estimated $7 billion will be the best since the 1920 world reconstruction boom. But 65% of them (excluding supplies to armed forces abroad) will be Government-shipped Lend-Lease goods. For exporters to keep their foreign organizations intact is nearly impossible, but they have plenty of work to do. To many a country 20-odd licenses, permits, other documents are necessary for even a $5 shipment.

But the economic tragedy is as deep for their customers as it is for the exporters. To maintain its transportation system Brazil in 1940 imported 1.3 million tons of coal, nine million barrels of oil and gasoline. Though approximately 70% of all shipping from the U.S. to South America's east coast is carrying coal as cargo, Brazil gets only a fraction of her needs. Tankers seldom visit her ports. No private automobiles ride the once busy streets of Rio and Sao Paulo, bus schedules have been slashed, many vital rail services are cut by half, other routes suspended. Even wood-burning steamers plowing the muddy Amazon River to Manaos are stopped: the woodcutters have slipped into the jungles to gather rubber for better pay. In Andean-wrinkled Chile and Peru where railroads are few, highway routes are all-important, few trucks have gasoline to run and even they are being laid up as tires wear out.

Plenty & Starvation. U.S. food exports to Latin America and the West Indies in 1939 totaled $50 million; now they are negligible. Argentina and Brazil are suffering because they cannot export crops, yet vast regions of the South American west coast and Panama, Trinidad, Puerto Rico are near starvation. Puerto Rico needs a minimum 110,000 tons of shipping a month to bring in supplies, is getting only 30,000 tons.

From Central America in 1940 the U.S. imported 31.7 million stems of bananas, 1.7 million bags of coffee. Now banana boats are carrying steel ingots across the Atlantic, coffee ships are scattered around the world's oceans (or sunk). Central American Governments have not enough revenue to take care of their unemployed plantation workers and stevedores. Their chief hope is finding work in a big hemp-growing project in Panama and Costa Rica started by United Fruit Co. By 1943, 20,000 acres of abandoned banana lands will be planted in hemp with 20,000 additional acres ready by 1944.

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