WORLD FARE AND WELFARE

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 36, 12 February 1936, Page 10

WORLD FARE AND WELFARE

When Mr. Stanley Bruce, on behalf of Australia, brought before last September's League Assembly the question of the relations of widespread deficient standards on the one hand and of tEe surplus of food products, or the actual restriction of their production, on the other, he started a movement which may go far towards penetrating to the root causes of both national and international unrest. At the time Mr. Bruce argued that by the increased consumption of certain foodstuffs specified diseases could be eliminated. He then added the warning that "unless the people were given the benefit of science social upheaval was inevitable." The argument was strongly supported by the British delegate (Lord de la Warr), who declared that "the paradox of a glutted market and hungry people was a problem for statesmanship" and Governments which had faced their responsibilities in regard to sanitation, control of infectious diseases, and housing must now "extend their activities to the question of food." The British delegate then went on to say:

It is surely worth while for all of us who are spending millilons on subsidies or on. export bounties to producers, to consider how far this principle of increasing consumption rather than subsidising production might be extended.

A special committee was accordingly formed, on the basis of Mr. Bruce's resolution, "to examine practical means of securing increased consumption of foods" and "to go into the question, of extending the League's health organisation on nutrition in relation to public health."

That was in September. The Nutrition Committee is now meeting at Geneva to discuss the data compiled in the meantime. In opening the session Lord Astor made an important statement (quoted in a cable message yesterday):

Restore public health and you will restore world trade. Tactful skill would be required to persuade people that specific diseases are avoidable by improved dietary; that "physique can be improved, robustness replace weakness, and that contentment and wellbeing can replace disharmony and discontentment. If this is achieved the whole economic policy of certaifi nations may be affected and the whole structure of agriculture influenced.

In other words, fare and welfare are intimately connected and a world that is enjoying good food is not so likely to give trouble as a world that is suffering from hunger or malnutrition. All history from its earliest origins goes to show that this is true. The migration of nations was almost invariably at the impulse of hunger and it is a commonplace that economic stress is a most frequent —perhaps the most frequent— cause of war. Similarly social upheaval finds its fulcrum in the feelings of classes who cannot get enough to eat. The Romans were well aware of the phenomenon when they organised the distribution of bread to the hungry populace of a city which had to be fed by com from abroad. Both the French and the Russian Revolutions sprang from the revolt of starving people and the comparative freedom of Britain from such disorders has been largely due to a more substantial national dietary, which doubtless governs to a certain extent the tolerant attitude of the British people towards their less fortunate neighbour nations. There is an old saying that it is no use arguing with a hungry man and if Mr. Bruce's Nutrition Committee can evolve some practical method of seeing that the "hungry people," mentioned by Lord de la Warr, can be fed from the "glutted market," then the world's most pressing problem will be in a fair way to be solved.