Who Is to Blame?

The Senate's Agriculture Committee this week began to dig to the bottom of the food muddle (see INTERNATIONAL). It had a big job on its hands. In all of vast bureaucratic Washington, everyone could put a finger on someone to blame. All this seemed to boil down to one main fact: there was no top control of the U.S. food supply or its allocation.

War Food Administrator Marvin Jones had the authority to do the job. Instead, he had let competing agencies -- particularly the armed forces -- grab all they thought they wanted. This had created some shortages where there should have been none. Actually, there was ample food for the U.S. Although the meat shortage is the worst of the war, the U.S. cattle population of over 80,000,000 is at an alltime high. But no one had laid down a basic, overall policy to get the meat to U.S. dinner tables.

More to Come. There were other shortages here, or on the way:

P: The rubber program, floundering under increasing military schedules and short ages of components for tires, was again in trouble. As a result, WPB cut the April allotment of civilian tires a third to 1,000,000, lowest quota in a year. Holders of A cards and most holders of Bs could hope for no new tires for months.

P: The armed services will take 40% of the U.S. butter supply in April, and 55% in May, more than double the take in butter-short February and March.

P: The civilian allowance of paper products -- towels, tissues, bags, etc. -- was heavily cut.

All down the line, from steel to soft drinks, the U.S. was being pinched tighter than at any time during the war. Washington turned away criticism with the pat phrase: "It's the war." To a large extent this was true; there was just not enough of everything to go around. But it was equally true that there were enough red tape and squabbles between competing agencies, and enough plain, old-fashioned bungling to keep the U.S. from getting the best use out of what it had.

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