Soviet Plans For Chemical Industry

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30311, 11 December 1963, Page 10

Soviet Plans For Chemical Industry

(N,Z.P.A.-Reut«r-ComirtBM> MOSCOW, December 9. The Soviet Prime Minister (Mr Khrushchev) today outlined a vast new “bread through chemistry” land to step up farm yields.

He forecast orders to foreign firms for "a whole complex of chemical plants to bolster Russia's lagging fertiliser supplies.' Mr Khrushchev, addressing the Soviet Communist Party's central committee in the Kremlin, defended his huge foreign wheat purchases. In Stalin’s day, grain bad been exported while people at home starved to death, he said. This year’s grain harvest was down by 20 per cent on the 1962 record, he revealed. Mr Khrushchev said that the orders to foreign firms were on condition that suppliers were content with an “honest profit” and that credits were available. In a speech lasting four hours and a half, he warned against Western attempts to dictate political conditions for grain and chemical deals with Russia. Investment Plans More than 42,000 million roubles would be invested betwen 1964 and 1970 in the development of the chemical industry and the comprehensive application of chemicals iin agriculture.

In this period, about 200 new chemical plants would be built and more than 500 others reconstructed. This compared with 5300 million roubles invested in the chemical industry between 1959 and 1963 —itself almost 50 percent more than in the first 40 years after the 1917 revolution.

At the same time, Mr Khrushchev said earlier plans to increase mineral fertiliser production to an annual 100 million tons by 1970 had been scaled down, and gave the new target for 1970 as between 70 million and 80 million tons—compared with 20 million tons this year. “When we have a powerful chemical industry, we shall not only accelerate technical progress in the entire sphere of material production and create an abundance of food products and consumer goods, but also obtain great accumulations

wnicn wiu ename us io advance the entire national economy even more rapidly,” he said. Stalin’s Methods “If we followed the methods of Stalin and Molotov in providing bread for the population then we would have been able to export grain even this rear,” he said. “This is what their method was: they exported grain while people in certain areas of this country became swollen with hunger or even starved to death." Mr Khrushchev said thatt for example in the Kurslar region—where he was raise# —people had starved to in 1047 while grain went* abroad. Mr Khrushchev said work* era’ incomes had increased 61, per cent in 10 years. Durin®, these 10 years, 108 million' people—almost half the; Soviet population—had moved, into new homes.