Bridge Buster

A keystone of President Johnson's foreign policy is "building bridges" to Communist Eastern Europe, especially to Yugoslavia, whose independence from Moscow the U.S. has long encouraged. Yugoslavia is the third largest recipient of American surplus food (after India and Pakistan), has taken almost $1 billion worth. Lately it has been seeking to buy an additional $29 million worth of wheat and vegetable oil under the easy payment terms of the Food-for-Peace program. However, as a result of two restrictive amendments passed by the last session of Congress, the flow of food to Tito's homeland has been mired, and finally halted, by an obscure bridge buster called the Findley Amendment.

It was so named for Illinois' Republican Representative Paul Findley, who managed to attach to the 1966 Agricultural Appropriation Act a rider forbidding the subsidized shipment of U.S. food to "any nation that sells or furnishes any equipment, materials or commodifies" to North Viet Nam. As it happens, the Yugoslavs have been sending Hanoi blood, bandages and other medical supplies. Though the State Department has contended that the Findley Amendment does not apply in this case, insisting that the supplies have been sent by private Yugoslav citizens rather than by the government, the amendment takes little notice of such niceties.

Dead Deal. The hassle has upset the Johnson Administration, which feels that its foreign policy aims are being undermined, and it has caused a furor in Yugoslavia. As President Tito said recently: "It comes at a time of implementation of our economic reform and causes difficulties. It doesn't improve relations." Nor were relations--or Tito's case--helped last month by three angry anti-U.S. demonstrations in Yugoslavia.

Actually, while the wheat deal is dead, Yugoslavia may still get a final shipment of $9.6 million worth of vegetable oil because the transaction was completed last April, well before Findley's amendment was approved by Congress. Nonetheless, Administration bridge building will be more seriously crimped in future by yet another amendment attached to the bill extending the Food-for-Peace program. It prohibits the shipment of bargain U.S. food to any nation that sells strategic materials to Cuba. Yugoslavia sends Castro goods ranging from truck tires to machinery. And, in fact, the U.S. is no longer in a position to dispense vast agricultural surpluses around the world. The Department of Agriculture estimates that wheat supplies on hand next July--before the new crop is harvested--will be no more than 420 million bushels, less than the nation's own need for a year's reserve.

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