The 66 Shiploads

Headline writers, inevitably, called it THE GREAT GRAIN ROBBERY. It was "really big stuff," said Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen. The G.O.P. Senate Policy Committee demanded a special Senate investigation, and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield agreed that the demand deserved "speedy consideration."

Delaware's Republican Senator John J. Williams started these rumblings last week by revealing that 24 million bushels of surplus U.S. livestock feed grains had somehow gone astray. The grain was supposed to have been shipped to Austria between 1959 and 1962 in a complex intergovernmental barter deal, but Administration officials admitted that international grain dealers had apparently reaped lush profits by illegally diverting most of the stuff to West Germany and selling it there.

Apparently a well-coordinated ring of German, Austrian, and possibly Swiss and American grain dealers arranged to have the shipments moved from such ports as Hamburg and Bremen directly into West German and other European markets, where grain brings premium prices. It was months later that a U.S. embassy official in Vienna compared shipping records and realized that while 40 million bushels of feed had left U.S. ports, only 16 million had ever reached Austria. Six Austrian grain importers were arrested and released on bail ranging up to $200,000, one of the highest figures in the country's history, for "mis-labeling." Since the U.S. Government demands cash or letters of credit in advance from U.S. exporters involved in grain barter deals, the U.S. stands to incur no direct losses.

Trade experts pointed out that U.S. Agriculture Department officials should have realized sooner that Austria (pop. 7,000,000) could not possibly absorb 40 million bushels of feed grains in four years. "You could feed all the chickens and pigs in Austria 24 hours a day," snickered one expert, "and it would still be piled so high you wouldn't be able to drive through the streets of Vienna." U.S. officials, moreover, must have been monumentally careless to let 24 million bushels of grain get lost. That comes to 665,000 tons, or roughly 66 shiploads.

Either somebody in the U.S. was acting dishonestly, muttered Senator Williams, or "there's something radically wrong with the laws," and he may well be right about that. The Agriculture Department's regulations governing international barter transactions are so loose that they invite dishonesty. According to one observer, "anybody would have to be nuts to be honest in this business."

Since the U.S. has negotiated similar barter deals involving $1.6 billion worth of agricultural commodities over the past 13 years, it was a pretty safe bet that U.S. agricultural attaches in many a foreign capital were hurriedly digging into the records to see who else has not been nuts.

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