While the Arab states continue to use oil production cutbacks as a political weapon against the United States, the U.S. has emerged as the prime source of grain and other farm products for the Middle East, according to a report today in the Agriculture Department’s publication, Foreign Agriculture.
The report said that in the July-Sept. 1973 period, American wheat shipments to the Arab countries totalled 145,000 metric tons, 5 1/2 times more than in the same period last year. Egypt bought $83 million of U.S. farm commodities during the fiscal year that ended last June 30, almost double the previous year’s purchases. Egypt bought 292,000 tons of wheat flour.
In recent months, Syria purchased 50,000 tons of U.S. durum wheat and Iraq about 100,000 tons this year. The publication said that floods in Pakistan were responsible for the Arab countries turning to the U.S. as a major source of rice pending deliveries from Thailand. U.S. rice exports to the Arab countries are expected to be double the 90,000 tons delivered in 1972.
The sale of U.S. grain and other farm products to the Middle East are expected to reach a record $600 million in fiscal 1973-74, a 60 percent jump over the previous year. The Middle East. according to Foreign Agriculture, is as big a market for American farm products as China or India. The U.S. is the chief supplier of soybeans to Israel. It buys tobacco from Lebanon and Syria, dates from Iraq, wine from Algeria and Israel and long staple cotton from Egypt and Sudan.
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