Good Will on the Hoof

Up before the Senate this week is another defense appropriation bill. The Army & Navy, with more & more mouths to feed, want to use part of their $4,389,000,000 to buy canned corned beef from Argentina. But they will not be allowed to --unless the Senate knocks out an amendment which persistently appears in such bills as they come from the House.

Author of the ubiquitous amendment is husky-throated, balding little James Graves Scrugham. Once a college professor, newspaper publisher, and Governor of cattle-raising Nevada, Scrugham has been Nevada's lone Representative since 1933.

In the House he has plugged a theme dear to cattle-State politicians: protect the U. S. livestock industry by keeping out South American meat. His amendment prohibits use of any part of the appropriation for food or clothing produced outside the U. S., thus applies to Australian wool as well as to Argentine beef. Says Congressman Scrugham: "I come from a district dependent almost entirely on beef and wool. I'm sent here to protect the interests of those growers. If I don't, they'll kick my --." To Good Neighborites, purchase of Argentine canned beef by the Army &; Navy makes sense from all angles. Argentina, with some 33.000,000 cattle, relies on meat for about 25% of its exports in normal years. Now that war has cut its shipments to Europe (its biggest customer) it needs desperately to start selling some of its beef to the U. S. to create foreign ex change with which it can buy U. S. goods.

U. S. packers find a ready market for cheap cuts of beef in an insatiable national appetite for hamburgers and hot dogs.

Hence they have little incentive to put them up in cans; most of the tinned beef sold in the U. S. already is packed in South America. In 1939 the Navy got a bid of 9.-c-7 a Ib. (not counting tariff) against a low bid of 23.6/ for U. S. tinned beef. Yet when President Roosevelt proposed that the Navy accept the Argentine bid (at a saving of $6,672), sectionally-minded Congressmen like Scrugham tied his hands.

Since the Nazification of Europe, longtime foes of the South American steer, like Wyoming's Senator O'Mahoney and the American National Livestock Association, have switched to approving Army & Navy purchases from Argentina. Administration Senators were determined to knock out the Scrugham amendment this week.

But even if Congress lets the military services buy tinned beef from Argentina, it will still have to decide how to be a Good Neighbor about Argentine raw meat.

This was banned from the U. S. by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930), which prohibits importation from countries infected with hoof-&-mouth disease (Argentina is one. Others: Ireland and Britain-- }. Patagonia, the southern part of Argentina, has never had hoof-&-mouth disease, is protected from the nation's chief cattle-growing regions by a mountain range and 200 miles of desert. The least Argentina expects from a Good Neighbor is permission to ship fresh meat from Patagonia. A convention negotiated by the sympathetic U. S. State Department in 1935 would give them this permission, but so far the Senate has refused to ratify it.

U. S. cattle raisers are deathly afraid of the fast-spreading hoof-&-mouth disease.

But Argentines still like to think that the U. S. will some day lift the embargo altogether. Last winter a report by the National Foreign Trade Council made their hopes a little brighter. The council's conclusion: the weight of scientific evidence is that hoof-&-mouth disease could not be brought to the U. S. by frozen meat. Its recommendation: Argentina should be permitted to ship about 3 Ib. of frozen raw beef annually for each U. S. citizen (present per capita consumption of all meats: 135 lb.). This amount, the council suggested, could hardly affect the U. S. livestock industry. But, in conjunction with a lower tariff rate on Argentine flaxseed shipments, it would add $50.000,000 a year to Argentina's foreign exchange. This is exactly the amount that the U. S. had to lend Argentina last December as a stopgap for its exchange problem.

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