Shultz Says U.S. Wheat Bonus Offer up to USDA

U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz said it was up to the Agriculture Department to decide whether to offer subsidized wheat to the Soviet Union.

Shultz told the Newspaper Farm Editors of America that a wheat bonus offer to the Soviet Union “is something that I basically leave to the Agriculture Department to figure out.”

Last year, Shultz spoke out against President Reagan’s decision to offer subsidized U.S. wheat to the Soviet Union – an offer Moscow spurned.

“I’ve always been a little put off by the idea that we would arrange our food supplies so as to price them in such a way that the Soviet housewife could buy American-produced food for less than the American housewife could buy it,” Shultz said.

“It also seems to me that if we are going to sell in world markets, we have to meet the price,” he added.

Shultz called proposals to broaden the eligibility criteria of USDA’s export enhancement program (EEP) to include all U.S. customers “questionable.”

An across-the-board EEP would mark a “considerable change” in the current program, which Shultz said is designed “to say to other countries that subsidize, particularly the European Common Market, that we’re not going to give up our markets to those subsidized sales and we’ll have a little kit bag that will meet that competition and hold our markets for our farmers.”

“If you just go across-the-board and subsidize everything, that’s a different order of program and seems to me quite questionable,” he said.