International: WHAT THE WORLD WILL EAT

What most people in 1947’s world want to know most is how they are going to eat for the next year. The man who is supposed to have the answer is Dennis A. FitzGerald, U.S. food expert and secretary general of the International Emergency Food Council, which tries to get the world’s food where it will do the most good. Last week FitzGerald made his report on next year’s prospects. Highlights:

¶ World production of grain (other than rice) is rising; but meats, fats and sugar are still down.

¶ Rice production in the Far East is still low; rice-consuming countries will continue to need shipments of wheat and other grains.

¶ This will require diversion of grain shipments from the West, which will more than offset the rise in grain production.

¶ World grain stocks are going down.

¶ Shipments from the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Australia and other grain-exporting countries will have to be much greater than the past year’s high level.

¶ Even so, “the world’s available export supplies . . . are too small to provide the additional tonnages needed by importing countries to keep basic rations at the winter level, which itself was too low for comfort or for health and good working energy.” That means that the peoples who were hungry last winter will be hungrier this winter.

¶ More countries are rationing food now than at the same time last year; in many other countries rationing has been extended.

¶ The U.S., which in the immediate prewar years shipped only a negligible portion of the world’s exported grain, now supplies 50.5% of all the world’s grain exports.

¶ At that, the U.S. is eating more food than it did before the war.

¶ By the 1948 harvest, the world food supply will probably be better.

¶ The reason for this slow, almost worldwide malnutrition: the total destruction of World War II (measured in dollars) was seven times greater than that of World War I.