Red Cash Sale

Touring Canada on a buying mission for Red China, two Hong Kong traders named Liu Liang and Yang Lu-liang were as quiet as could be, seemed chiefly interested in eluding publicity. Canadians hoped they were also interested in grain, were moderately pleased fortnight ago to land a $5,300,000 order for barley. Last week Agriculture Minister Alvin Hamilton rose in Parliament to announce that the Red traders had expanded the order beyond his most optimistic hopes: just before taking off for Hong Kong, they signed a $60 million cash deal for 28 million bushels of wheat and 12,133,000 more bushels of barley.

Hamilton billed the deal as the biggest sale since World War II. It pushes Communist China from nothing to third among Canada's grain customers (behind Britain and Japan), and will probably keep West Coast handlers busy until fall clearing the shipment, which will take upward of 100 ships to move.

Red China's decision to part with $60 million of its low foreign exchange reserves confirmed that its agriculture is in serious trouble, not only from natural calamities but from a mismanaged attempt to speed industrialization by releasing manpower from farm communes. But the Canadian negotiators got no clue from Traders Liu and Yang on how serious Red China's food shortage may be. "They were very sensitive about the word famine," said Hamilton, "so we didn't talk about it."

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