The Press SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1945. Food

Press, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24678, 22 September 1945, Page 6

The Press SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1945. Food

When the Minister of Agriculture announced this month that growers should plant no more vegetables under Internal Marketing Department contract, without authority from the district office, he said that it had been learned that exports to the American forces would probably not be required after the end of this year. The same instructions applied to potatoes and onions as to green vegetables. It is curious that nobody appears to have asked, and nobody appears to have thought it necessary to explain without being asked, whether the situation in Britain and Europe was considered before this decision was taken. All the evidence so far made public shows that food will be even scarcer in Europe than had been estimated before the war ended. Seeds, fertiliser, tools, machines, livestock, and fodder—all are in desperately short supply. The situation has deteriorated, and may rapidly fall into catastrophe, largely because millions of persons evicted from eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia have been thrown into the zones of occupation, where the problems of subsistence and shelter were already grave. This is to say nothing, moreover, of the situation in China, immense areas of which have been famine-ridden, and in other eastern and Pacific territories, including (it may be) Japan itself. It is not easy to believe that food which it would have been necessary to send to General MacArthur’s forces, had the war continued, will not be needed elsewhere; and it can only be believed on the plainest official statement that full inquiry has been made and shows that growing and processing vegetables for export should stop. No such statement has been made. Has the inquiry been made? Has it been taken far enough? The world has seen enough of wholesale tragedy in the last six years. Its last chapters have not yet been written. They may be the worst. No country that can do and give anything to avert or mitigate their horror will be able to acquit itself of responsibility, if it fails in the thought and the acts of salvation.