CHAOS IN FRANCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25802, 24 March 1945, Page 8

CHAOS IN FRANCE

SHORTAGE OF FOOD SUPPLIES PARIS, Mar. 22. Women carrying empty shopping baskets and shouting, “We are living on air,” yesterday marched through Paris from the Bastille to the Town Hall. The women said they had had no butter, margarine, or lard for three months. One woman said: “We get only potatoes, carrots, and bread. Our children are tubercular.” Another alleged that butter was available on the “black market” at 4s a lb.

An official of the French Food Ministry, who described the situation as chaotic, said demonstrations could not be permitted, otherwise there might be bloodshed. He revealed that the daily ration of calories a head in Paris had fallen to under 1000, which is said to be the lowest since 1870. Conditions were much worse in Southern France, where “ famine is imminent.” “ Demonstrations against the food conditions by 50,000 trades unionists in Marseilles yesterday, following demonstrations in Paris, Nancy, and elsewhere, are only the loudest echoes of the profound feeling throughout the country,” says the Daily Telegraph’s Paris correspondent. “The people are disappointed that, seven months after liberation, the food situation is worse than before. They are angry at the thought that large stocks exist, and the already scanty transport is often misused. A transport expert points out in Les Nouvelles du Matin that, although exactly half the prewar number of wine wagons have returned to service, the wine ration in Paris is only two bottles a month.”

When in London in July, 1942, for consultation purposes, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith made an emphatic promise that “we are going back to Burma; we have got to help the Burmese to rebuild their country, both Dhysically and economically.” The British Government, in a statement of its intentions, endorsed this promise when it said at the same time: “The property and goods destroyed or damaged in Burma should be replaced or repaired as resources permit.