ECONOMICS: Famine’s End?

The sun, the ram and the prices were right. Nourished by all three, the world’s grainfields were blooming. Hunger might come again next year, out crop reports indicated that 1946’s worst was over.

The U.S. was harvesting the biggest crop in its history. The wheat output was expected to reach 1,132,075,000 bushels, 42 million more than the July 1 estimate, some nine million more than last year’s all-time high. Granted a good soaking rain in the corn belt within a fortnight, corn production would also break records; the Department of Agriculture’s estimate last week was 3,487,976,000 bushels, some 250 million better than the previous high in 1944.

Canada was almost certain to arrive within 10% of its 550 million bushel record of 1942. Turkey was harvesting 35 million bushels more grain than last year. France’s North African Empire, last year the scene of food riots, was doing so well by now that it expected to send up to 20 million bushels of surplus wheat and barley to the home country. France herself looked forward to a 295 million bushel wheat harvest, which would reduce her import needs from 70 million bushels in 1946 to a mere 20 million in 1947. Greece, Spain and Portugal hoped to raise grain production to approach their prewar levels. South Africa and Australia were expanding their wheat acreages. Argentina, drought-stricken last year, reported favorable crop conditions.

Cautioning Hand. Encouraged by the prospects at home and abroad, U.S. grain traders promptly began pressing for suspension of all price controls, millers for permission to make flour whiter, distillers to abolish allocations. But the Department of Agriculture raised a cautioning hand. The world crop, although considerably higher than last year’s 5.2 billion bushels, would still fall below the prewar average of 5.9 billion. And not all the news was good.

Russia kept her production figures secret. Outside estimates forecast a better yield than last year, but not exceeding the low wartime average. If Paris reports were true, the Soviet Government was seeking to sell some 50 million bushels of grain abroad; it was probably not because of surplus stocks, but to win friends and influence people. Crop estimates from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland were discouraging. In India and China, famine threatens to linger on at least until November, when the new rice crop will be gathered.

Crusading Plan. Such famine hazards were exactly what was on the mind of Sir John Boyd Orr, banyan-browed Scottish nutritionist and food crusader. To the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), of which he is director general, he was about to submit a plan which would free farming from gambling, he hoped. FAO, now only an advisory body, should enter the operating field, create a central financial system for buying any nation’s surplus crops; it would eventually control production, fix prices, do away with the up-&-down cycles.

U.S. experts called Sir John’s plan hopelessly Utopian. Carried to its logical conclusion, they argued, it would end free trade in agricultural products, set up a socialized super government with the power to change the whole character of any farm region in the world, or ruin it. What would Sir John do with the surpluses? Burn them! Give them away? Sir John’s plan might cost billions; so far, in his blueprinting, Sir John had not got around to saying where the money would come from.