RELIEF: How Much Hunger?

The display looked like a schoolgirl’s botany project. The little green leaves and wispy roots, neatly mounted on 14 neat white sheets, had pretty names—O Cheng Cho”v, Ti Chai Tzi, Sweet Chrysanthemum. But the exhibits of grass and herbs, no trophy of a schoolgirl’s outing in the country, were part of an official report from the China office of UNRRA. The pretty names stood for wild leaves and stems and roots that the peasants of Hunan province (where 5,000,000 face death) have lived on for 40 days.

The appalling responsibilities of victory had come to be represented by one word. “Bread,” said Herbert Hoover in Cairo last week, “has a reality as the symbol of life as never before in history. … To reduce the bread ration has become a symbol of calamity.”

How It Happened. War’s disruption was the main cause. To it nature had added floods in China and French Indo-China, a tidal wave in Madras, drought in Australia, South Africa, Greece and Mexico. Rice as well as wheat was short; but since the four main countries (the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina) whose surplus grain might avert famine produced wheat, not rice, the world food crisis was spelled in terms of wheat.

Before the war only about 13,000,000 tons of wheat had to be imported by countries that could not grow all they needed. But the war and natural disasters sent import needs skyrocketing. Europe, which imported less than 4,000,000 tons of wheat a year before the war, needed 15,400,000 tons this crop year from the 1945 harvest to the 1946. Asia and Africa, which normally imported only 2,400,000 tons, have needed almost 11,000,000 tons. All in all, needy countries came begging for 32,000,000 tons of wheat this year instead of the normal 13,000,000 tons of imports. The surplus countries (mainly the U.S. and Canada) may be able to provide 24,000,000 tons before the end of the crop year, but the world would then still be 8,000,000 tons short of its minimum need.

At Gundel’s Restaurant in Budapest’s Town Park an American could eat a black-market meal of pate de foie gras, venison, wine, salad, and dessert for $1.66. The same meal would cost a dollarless Hungarian six times the best monthly salary any Hungarian could earn today. Hungarians got five ounces of bread daily. City-dwellers jammed trains to scour the countryside for food. . . . In Italy, where one of Europe’s lowest bread rations was about to be cut again, Premier Alcide de Gaspari warned: “We are on the eve” of starvation.

What It Meant. To translate the balance sheet of wheat tonnage figures into terms of human need was not easy. The experts agreed that it was quite possible that the figures spelled starvation for scores of millions of people. But the starvation could be “controlled” (spread out into disease-breeding malnutrition) by rationing. The experts said that a human needed at least 2,200 calories a day. The average U.S. citizen (still eating more than he had before the war) consumed more than 3,200 calories a day. In India there were at least 55 million city-dwellers living on a ration of 960 calories, and this might soon be cut.

In the French zone of Germany the ration was 940 calories; in the British zone about a thousand; in the U.S. zone 1,275; in the Russian zone 1,300 to 1,500. Germans were not dropping dead on the streets. But a U.S. military government officer explained the relation of calories to life this way: on 700 calories a man could stay alive if he kept in bed with warm covering; on 1,000 calories he could walk around the room a bit; on 1,300 he could perform light work. The British economist, Sir Arthur Salter, said: “Ten million . . . Germans in the British zone are getting an average of only 1,014 calories daily, which is too much to let you die quickly and too little to let you live long.”

Britons had seen no onions for five months. Each got one shell egg a week (wartime powdered eggs have disappeared from the British diet). A pineapple cost $30. Yet a girl from France visiting London called it “paradise” because “they have enough to eat and in France we haven’t.” The French got 10 oz. of bread a day, 20 oz. of fat and 18 oz. of sugar a month. This was supplemented by a little meat, fish and vegetables.

How Long? Herbert Hoover said last week that this crisis was unique in history because it had “a definite terminal date . . . the arrival of the next harvest.” That was probable, but by no means certain. This present crisis could only be met by reducing the stocks of the surplus countries. If 1946 harvests were plentiful or even up to the prewar norm, the world would get through to the 1947 harvest, although at a lower level of subsistence than before the war. (Strange as it seemed, after all the killing, there were 100 million more people in the world in 1946 than in 1939; 35 million of them were in India alone.) But if 1946 crops were subnormal or if the organization of food supply broke down at any critical point, the famine of 1947 might be worse than that which threatened in 1946.