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Home & Abroad. Sicilian businessmen learned to take full advantage of their country's natural resources. Sicily's position astride shipping routes turned the port of Palermo into the Mediterranean's busiest repair center, with 5,000 new workers. New irrigation and land-reclamation schemes are making agriculture a prime source of foreign exchange, with export sales of processed fruits and vegetables rising from almost nothing in 1946 to $37 million in 1955, some $48 million last year. Much of the new industry is homegrown, but much more comes from foreign businessmen and mainland Italians who know a good thing when they see it. Italy's Montecatini Co. recently opened a big potash works near Syracuse employing 2,000 workers, is already building a second to tap newly discovered deposits 55 miles inland. French chemical, German beer and electric-power companies are also moving in.
But the biggest moneymaker of all is Sicily's booming young oil industry. Instead of throttling foreign oil exploration by setting up a state-run monopoly such as Italy's ENI (TIME, Sept. 2), Sicily encouraged Gulf Oil Corp. with a deal that one U.S. oilman calls "the best terms of any oil company operating anywhere in the world." Instead of the standard fifty-fifty split, Gulf gets 80% of all profits, has pumped $50 million into Sicilian oil development. The payoff: wells that will produce 1,650.000 tons of oil next year, some 15% of Italy's total needs. Last week British Petroleum and Standard Oil Co. (New Jersey) were also coming in beside Gulf.
Businessman La Cavera knows that Sicily has a long way to go. Sicily's per capita income is still woefully low at $175 annually (v. $470 in Italy's industrial region of Piedmont); many thousands of unemployed still eke out a bare existence, eating lumache ed erbe (snails and greens) gathered in the woods. But Sicily has hope and enterprise for the first time in. centuries. "It doesn't require miracles," says La Cavera. "All it takes is will and work, intelligence and initiative. In ten years, we'll catch up with the rest of Italy and then we'll push ahead."