Coffee Smiles

Washington has rarely seen so truly cheerful a pair of official guests as El Salvador's President Jose Maria Lemus, 47, and his pretty, 32-year-old wife. At National Airport, when President Eisenhower greeted them, at a formal White House dinner, after a Manhattan ticker-tape parade, their smiles came naturally and easily and their moods were clearly carefree. A 45-minute conference with Ike stretched Lemus' smile even wider. Ike told him, said Lemus, that the U.S. was considering "with sympathy" the establishment of U.S. import quotas for coffee that is piled mountain-high in surplus storage warehouses in such exporting nations as his throughout the hemisphere.

Some such U.S.-backed system of upholding coffee prices has long been the dream of Latin America's coffee-based nations,* but the U.S. has shied away from coffee price supports as a nightmare just as dreadful as grain supports in the U.S. Lately, the U.S. has come to realize that quotas might stabilize the market, and prices as well, at no cost to the U.S. Treasury. In practice, the arrangement would work like the long-successful sugar quota system, which guarantees producing nations specific shares of U.S. sugar imports each year. By assigning each coffee country a sure market for a set amount of coffee, the quotas should discourage the present wild overproduction and cutthroat competition among the surplus-ridden growers.

Recently, the State Department sent a squad of informal poll takers padding through the marble corridors of the House and Senate Office Buildings. Results of the poll: little or no objection to the quota system.

* The big five, and the percentage of their export income earned by coffee: Brazil 65%, Colombia 84%, Mexico 16%, El Salvador 88%, Guatemala 77%.

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