Dirty Rain

The heart of Nikita Khrushchev's oft-proclaimed intention of lifting the Russian standard of eating to the U.S. level lies in a vast expansion of grain production--grain being the raw material of meat, dairy products and poultry. For weeks past, huge dust storms originating in the Soviet Union and sweeping westward into Europe have announced to all and sundry that Khrushchev's food program is in serious trouble.

The storms began in early April, when hot, dry winds off the Central Asian plateau, melting the skimpy snow cover, swept across a 1,500-mile belt extending from the Caspian Sea through the Caucasus, southern Ukraine and Crimea to Moldavia. The parched earth turned to dust, then rose in sun-obscuring clouds.

As usual, Moscow suppressed the news as long as it was suppressible. But after dust and sand began falling on Bulgaria, Rumania, and even Yugoslavia and Poland, Radio Moscow guardedly began reporting "dirty rain" around Kiev. Making the best of a bad situation, Izvestia described how 17 "heroic collective farm workers" had shoveled four feet of dust off a hog-farrowing shed near Krasnodar, then stayed around to play midwife to the sows.

Last week Radio Moscow admitted that moisture conditions in the Caucasus and southern Ukraine were the worst since 1928, conceded that in places a third of the winter wheat was destroyed and would need to be replanted for even a partial harvest. Western agricultural intelligence sources estimated that even with excellent weather conditions for the rest of the year, Russia's 1960 grain harvest is unlikely to exceed last year's 124,800,000 tons (which was down from 1958's record 141,200,000), and might go as low as no million tons.

Khrushchev had programed 153 million tons, and had promised millions of Russian consumers that this year they would begin to get steak. But the prospect is that they are in for another year of the same old bread-and-cabbage diet.

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