Moving Wheat to Russia

For the next twelve months, railway and port facilities in Canada will be humming at top capacity, and even then they will be pressed to keep up with the traffic. That traffic is wheat.

Last week Canada announced the sale of 187 million bu. to Russia, an order second only in history to Russia's fantastic 1963 purchase of 239 million bu.

The sale raised Russia's total 1965 order for Canadian wheat to 222 mil lion bu., all of which will be delivered between now and August 1966. At a press conference in Winnipeg, Trade Minister Mitchell Sharp and William McNamara, head of the Canadian

Wheat Board, said the Russians were paying the top-grade price of $1.93 a bu., or almost $450 million. Coupled with other sales to Red China, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, the new deal guarantees a market for Canada's entire 1965 wheat crop (estimated at 800 million bu.), will boost wheat export earnings to a record $1.2 billion this year and cut deeply into Canada's $453-mil-lion balance-of-payments deficit. In return, Sharp promised Russian Trade Delegate Nikolai Ossipov that Canada would increase its purchases from Russia, now a mere $3,000,000 yearly.

The sale was one more sign of the sorry state of Communist agriculture. This year, the Soviets said, it was a case of too much rain in Central Russia and too little in the Caucasus and Kazakhstan's much-touted "virgin lands." The result will be a 1965 wheat crop of 2 billion bu., compared with a 1958-62 average of 2.5 billion bu. To meet growing demands within both Russia and the satellite countries, the Soviets have bought 330 million bu. of wheat in the world market since June, including 80 million bu. from Argentina.

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