No Ukranian Food For Germans

Manawatu Times, Volume 66, Issue 264, 6 November 1941, Page 5

No Ukranian Food For Germans

Fuel Shortage Interferes With Nazi Fanning

SABOTAGE IN OCCUPIED COUNTRIES

(British Official Wireless.) Received Wednesday, 7 p.m. RUGBY, Nov. 4.

The Germans now admit that the famous granary of the Ukraine cannot fulfil the popular expectation of a new assured food supply. The organ of the

‘*' Reich Food Estate ’ ’ takes care to explain that “the German food supply nm3t be assured primarily by our own production,” and offers as an excuse the argument that Ukrainian food exports have declined from ten to tw r o million tons a year in the last 15 years because of Bolshevik administration. In fact the decline in the grain surplus for export has been caused by the enormous growth of the Russian population in the last few decades.

In Germany itself the fuel shortage is causing a reversion to obsolete methods of cultivation, a west German newspaper complaining that “the w'ork is being irresponsibly executed with tractors where horses or oxen would suffice,” and urging farmers not to use tractors except when the work is beyond tho capacity of animals. To the fuel difficulties are added agricultural sabotage in occupied Europe. A German newspaper in Czechoslovakia reports that a high official of the protectorate Ministry of Agriculture has been shot for having intentionally neglected his farm where milk production decreased to 16 litres daily from twenty cows and an order to grow sugar-beet had been disregarded. This official had even instituted disciplinary procedure against an officer of the Ministry of Agriculture who discovered his mismanagement. Swedish workers also are unwilling to work for Germany, states a Swedish newspaper discussing German attempts to recruit them and pointing out that of two and a-half million foreign workers in Germany, all but a few are prisoners of war.

Other countries are unable to escape the consequences of Germany’s ‘ 1 new order,” as appears from the official German account of the recent ItaloGerman economic “negotiations” in Rome. Although Italy is exporting t,o Germany large quantities of foodstuffs such as/ rice, fruit and olives, the German statement refers to “goods which are to be shipped to Italy to alleviate the present food situation” without specifying what these goods will be. Thus the hungry senior Axis partner has taken steps to obtain solid food in exchange for promises to feed the still hungrier junior partner. This perhaps explains Mussolini’s words on the occasion of the interment of the remains of Goffredo Manuali, the poet and follower of Garibaldi, “Nobody should draw arbitrary conclusions from our silences which are often protracted and sometimes necessary. We do not forget.”