GENERAL FARM PROGRAM 1017 



profiteer that it is willing to spend in 1 month alone the sum of 

 $125,000,000 to aid it, yet cannot spare a single dollar for a vital 

 American agi'icultural endeavor, fighting with its back to the wall to 

 keep from being totally destroyed? 



How can the United States Department of Agriculture justify its 

 contention that a support price of 25 cents per pound as granted in 

 1947 is "unrealistic" or, in other words, unfau' to the paint and varnish 

 industry when that same industry was glad to pay 40 cents a pound 

 for tung oil in 1946-47 when costs of production were lower than they 

 are now? No one has been able to find out from the Department just 

 what a "realistic" price is, but it is significant that the Chinese Gov- 

 ernment, which controls China's tung oil supply recently placed a 

 floor of 20 cents on tung oil, C. and F. New York, to keep the bottom 

 from entirely dropping out of the market. Is the American tung 

 farmer forever to remain at the mercj^ of foreign manipulators? To 

 put it even more bluntly, does this country want a tung industry or 

 does it prefer to remain dependent on other countries for supplies of a 

 product whose value as an essential war material cannot be gauged 

 in terms of dollars and cents? 



American tung farmers and millers have beer repeatedly informed 

 by the Commodity Credit Corporation that it would not grant a sup- 

 port price for the 1948 crop of tung nuts because of its "experience" 

 with the 1947 support price program for tung. Interests within the 

 industry were considerably mj^stified by this statement because the 

 CCC did not elucidate further on its "experience." 



CCC explained that it purchased Iji million pounds of American 

 tung oil under the 1947 support program at the support price of 25 

 cents per pound. Most of this oil, it later developed, was resold by 

 the CCC, some to the United States Army for building airplane run- 

 ways in Japan, some to Germany, and the remainder to industries con- 

 suming tung oil, the price ranging from 24 to 24^2 cents per pound. 



If the CCC had turned thumbs down on the 1948 crop of tung nuts 

 on the grounds that it had lost too much money on the 1947 transac- 

 tion such an explanation would certainly have appeared strange indeed 

 considering the fact that on the outside CCC could not have lost more 

 than $300,000 with some authorities contending that the actual loss 

 was only about $78,000. Even if the CCC had lost its entire invest- 

 ment in tung oil, the cost to this country for aiding a vitally important 

 and essential industry would have been but $1,875,000. Consider 

 this investment in developing such a strategic commodity in com- 

 parison with the vast sums spent by this same agency in supporting 

 the prices of such commodities as Irish potatoes— 49 million dollars 

 annually; figs and raisins — 17K million dollars in 1947; dehydrated 

 eggs — 2/2 million dollars a day, with 60 million dollars pledged in 1949 

 to keep up the price of peanuts. 



Americti's tung growers were further mystified and shocked at a 

 statement appearing in the Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter, leading 

 publication of the paint and varnish industry, in which an unidentified 

 oflacial of the CCC was quoted: 



Commodity Credit Corporation decided "sometime ago" against a price-support 

 program for the 1948 crop of tung nuts, an official of the agencj' said last week. A 

 support program has been in operation since the war in order to enable producers to 

 adjust their production to postwar conditions, and officials feel that ample time 

 has been allowed to make this adjustment. 



