Foreign Relations: Breadbasket Diplomacy

Only a few years ago, the nation’s proliferating surpluses of wheat and corn seemed as immutable as original sin. Today, thanks to the 1954 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act—the Food for Peace program —the U.S. has whittled the hoard to less burdensome levels by simply selling, bartering and giving away $14 billion worth of surplus food and fiber in eleven years. In 1964 alone, Food for Peace shipments totaled $1.7 billion, one-third of all U.S. foreign aid.

However, the program so far has only palliated the world’s long-term need for food. The earth’s population, already underfed, is expected to double by the year 2000, will then require three times as much food as it now grows. Consequently, when the present program expires at the end of 1966, the Johnson Administration plans to use farm surpluses as a lever to make underdeveloped nations grow more food for themselves.

Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, who carried the word to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome last week, warns that unless recipient countries devote as much effort to increasing agricultural production as they do to prestige-building industrial projects, they could face a cutoff of U.S. food. Otherwise, he says, within 20 years the combined capacity of the U.S. and the Western world will not be sufficient to fill the gap. Said Freeman: “World hunger can be finally solved only in those areas where it is most prevalent.” It can be done. In twelve of 26 new nations, crop increases averaged 5.6% yearly between 1948 and 1963.

Freeman’s message was discreetly but unmistakably beamed at India, which has received the lion’s share ($2.6 billion) of Food for Peace commodities, last year took 15% of the entire U.S. wheat crop—and still faces famine (see THE WORLD). Ghana had a ruder awakening. Two days after the State Department lodged a strong protest over a new virulently anti-American book by Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah, the U.S. declined his government’s request for $129 million worth of wheat, rice and dried milk. Faced with ever dwindling reserves and ever increasing demand, the Administration made clear that The Redeemer had better concentrate on feeding his people.