The Soviet Union and the United States have reached agreement on a new long term shipping deal which will give work to laid up American cargo vessels. The six-year accord, which the sides said “will facilitate the expanding trade between the two countries”, was sealed after resolution of a last-minute dispute over costs of shipping grain to Russian ports.

The Soviets bought a reported 20 million tons of grain from U.S. companies last year to eke out a disastrous harvest. They agreed on Sept. 17, 1975, that American ships would carry at least a third of this grain and of supplies under a five-year agreement starting this year.

“This new agreement … is designed to extend the basic arrangements reached since 1972 concerning the carriage of cargoes between the United States and the Soviet Union, including the rate arrangements of Sept. 17, 1975, regarding the shipment of grain to the U.S.S.R.”, it said.

The agreement is to run to Dec. 31, 1981, and replaces a three-year agreement which expired at the end of last year.

Work is scheduled to start on a scheme to link the North Sea and the Mediterranean by a canal between the Rhine and Rhone rivers. The project will also link up with the Danube, so opening up an integrated inland waterway network through both East and West Europe.

In a first phase, the programme provides for completion of the development of the valleys leading to the sea at Le Havre, Dunkirk, Rotterdam and Marseilles. The main poles remain the Seine below Paris and the Rhine, both rivers now open to barge convoys totalling 15,000 tons. The next stage will be to join the Dunkirk-Valenciennes Canal to the Belgian network and finally the Rhine-Rhone link will join the Rhine near Mulhouse with the Saone at Saint-Symphorien.

The French are pushing ahead with the project for fear of losing out to West Germany in the tough competition to capture new markets in Western as well as Eastern Europe.

Prospects for moving inland water traffic by 1982 between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, and ultimately towards the Danube States, will stimulate the industrialisation of the European Economic Community in general and the Rhone Valley of south-eastern France in particular. It will be a vital asset for the port of Marseilles and its neighbouring steel complex at Fos, Europe’s second biggest harbour and marine industrial area after Rotterdam.

Work on the 5,900 million francs project begins at the Alsace end of the proposed canal under France’s seventh five-year economic development plan running to 1980. The waterway, designed to provide a transport system for large barge convoys, will be about 230 kilometres long, and have 24 locks.

The reopening of the Suez Canal and the extension of container facilities at Marseilles should boost the traffic potential to 10 million tons a year by 1985. The