The Press SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 1944. Food for Europe

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24150, 8 January 1944, Page 4

The Press SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 1944. Food for Europe

As the day for the grand assault on Hitler’s European fortress draws nearer the British and American Governments are wisely explaining and emphasising their plans for European relief. Mr Roosevelt’s New Year message was almost entirely taken up with this topic; and the British Government has found the proceedings of the first session of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration important enough to warrant the issue of a White Paper. Plans for European relief are not merely effective propaganda; they are safe propaganda. So far, most of the political warfare of the United Nations has either been innocuous or has threatened the unity of the United Nations themselves. The whole history of the Allied occupation of southern Italy has shown how difficult it is for Britain, America, and Russia to agree on a political policy for a country which has been liberated or is about to be liberated. But UNRRA can be steered reasonably clear of politics. Apart from mild disagreements over the extent to which it should be dominated by the Great Powers and over the order of priority among the nations receiving relief, its problems are administrative and economic, rather than political. To say this is not to suggest that UNRRA is a propaganda device for the main purpose of raising the peoples of Europe against their Nazi masters. It has been created, first, by the humanitarian feelings of the British and American peoples and, second, by their understanding that it is in their own interest that Europe should be fed and clothed and its industries restarted as soon as possible after peace has been declared. UNRRA means business; and the constitution which has been hammered out in six months of negotiation gives it the chance to become one of the most efficient international organisations ever devised. Any doubts over its capacity to do the work it has been set up to do concern something which is in the main outside its control—the production of the commodities it needs for relief. At first, and probably for several years after the end of the war, it will need vast quantities of energy foods, chiefly wheat, rice, various kinds of beans, and meat. It has a good start with the 100,000,000 bushels of wheat available under the wheat agreement. But 100,000,000 bushels will not go far among 500,000,000 hungry Europeans; and it must be confessed that apart from this reserve stock the prospects are not bright. All the agricultural countries have had their producing capacity impaired by the shortage of labour, fertilisers, and farm machinery; nor will peace make it possible to repair the shortages at once and lift output accordingly. Moreover, the psychological obstacles are as great as the material obstacles. It will take more than a few years of war shortages and high prices to remove from the farmer’s mind the fear of over-production and glutted markets which haunted him in the whole of the period between the two wars. Left to himself, the farmer of the new world is likely to conclude that the huge European market created by the relief problem will be transitory and that therefore it will be imprudent to plan production to meet the needs of this market. There are already some signs of this attitude. American rice growers are protesting against their Government’s efforts to persuade Cubans to grow more rice for relief. According to American newspapers, the British Government has objected to a scheme to increase the output of peanu : —a valuable source of protein—in French West Africa, because of the effect on the Gold Coast peanut industry. The truth seems to be that the success of UNRRA will depend mainly on the readiness of the governments represented at Hot Springs to carry out the recommendations of that conference; As the experts assembled there pointed out, there never has been enough food for all the peoples of the world. There is no country which could not improve the health of its people by a better diet. It follows that if all countries, or even only the countries represented at Hot Springs, were to take up seriously the task of bringing their national dietaries up to the scale necessary for full health, the spectre of over-produc-tion would vanish—provided always that the farming industries are, or become, sufficiently flexible to switch part of their productive capacity over to protective foods, once the post-war demand for energy foods has been met. The interesting conclusion emerges, therefore, that the plan for European relief is linked up with the wider plan for raising dietary standards throughout the world and at the same time giving agriculture such prosperity and stability as it has never enjoyed in the 'present century. If fear of glutted markets is stronger than belief in the possibility of a world of plenty, then millions of human beings will be condemned to malnutrition as a normal condition of existence, agriculture will remain unstable, and European relief will be only a partial success.