The Press FRIDAY, AUGUST 10, 1962. Where Food Is Short

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29897, 10 August 1962, Page 10

The Press FRIDAY, AUGUST 10, 1962. Where Food Is Short

In nothing do the times seem more out of joint than in the contrast between the wrangles in Brussels over the distribution of plenty and the flight of East Germans to Poland to escape scarcity. In the long run nothing will do more to damage the Communist cause than the inability of communism to feed its people properly, let alone catch up with the " decad- “ ent ” West. The case of East Germany is particularly sad. In peace, the Germans were well fed and had food to export. Unlike the Chinese they were not the victims of repeated famines; unlike the Russians their production was not in the hands of peasants whose history was serfdom. Deficiencies in East German food supplies can hardly be blamed on anything but the economic and political system the territory has endured since the war, a system that has forced the Government to put its pride in its pocket and ask the West German Government for credits that would ultimately be used to give the people enough to eat. The Germans have not taken kindly to collectivisation. Many farmers have fled to the West. Others are sullenly unco-operative and lethargic. The result is that supplies are lower than they have previously been for perhaps 10 years.

The East German Government, like the Russian Government, may be forced into a capitalist method of equating demand and supply. In Russia, Mr Khrushchev has raised prices (meat and butter are now nearly 14s a pound) with the dual purpose of checking consumption and giving incentive to production. This is a more constructive approach than the imposition of the death penalty for “economic crimes”, a return to barbarism. Mr Khrushchev himself plainly realises the value of incentive. In a recent speech he mentioned the case of a man who had earned a bonus of nine tons of maize but had been denied it on the ground that “ it was too “ much ”, “He has earned “it and he must have it”, Mr Khrushchev decreed. But incentives alone are not enough while agriculture and consumer goods are given a much lower priority for capital than heavy industry, armaments, and sputniks. Some day, as the “ New York Times ” has remarked, someone in the Kremlin must realise that the surest solution to the economic problems of the Communist empire (and of the rest of the world) lies in ending the cold war and using the resources of the world as a whole to raise the living standards of people everywhere.