The Bad News

The average U.S. citizen well knew that his nation's main job in the postwar world was to help feed it. It was all right with him that the nation had taken on the biggest part of the job, for the good old U.S.A. was still the land of plenty. And he thought that the nation was pretty well on its way with the job.

Last week the average citizen picked up his newspaper and got a breath-taking shock. His President told him that the U.S. no longer had plenty. The citizen and his wife read the sudden, almost incredible news:

White bread--the symbol of American plenty--would have to be displaced by a grey-or cream-colored bread*; the President decreed that wheat flour be made from 80% instead of the normal 70% of the whole grain. Production of whiskey and of other grain alcohol beverages would have to be cut back to wartime levels. Beer brewing would have to be cut by 30% (back to the 1940 rate). The wartime set-aside of pork for Government purchase was reinstated. The President warned the U.S. that it might even have to go back to meat rationing.

All this was necessary, said President Truman, if the U.S. was to keep its pledges to Europe and the rest of the world. Otherwise the world food crisis might turn into the worst famine of modern times--"More people face starvation and even actual death for want of food today than in any war year and perhaps more than in all the war years combined."

Fact & Fancy. The President's action --and warning--had been long delayed. Even if the U.S. continued to keep its promises to the world, hunger would still gnaw at the bellies of millions. Great Britain, trying to help others while she herself still needed help, had cut some rations below their wartime level (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Over the next few months, said the Allied Emergency Economic Committee for Europe, 100,000,000 Europeans will be down to a daily average of 1,500 calories, and some 140,000,000 will be down to 2,000 calories. (UNRRA considers the "safe minimum" to be about 2,500 calories a day; the U.S. average is about 3,300 a day.)

Europe's grain fields lacked tools and transport; drought and locusts have blighted crops in Argentina, Africa, India. Even Canada's great prairies--from which the U.S. had borrowed at times--harvested one-fourth less wheat last year.

Almost everywhere but in the U.S. there was serious shortage--and President Truman's aides had sadly overestimated the U.S. position. In the first postwar rush to bring food shopping back to normal, Agriculture Secretary Clinton Anderson had decided that everything was so rosy that almost all restrictions could be removed. Now, in connection with the President's announcement, he was forced to concede that somehow the nation had 61,000,000 fewer bushels of wheat than he had figured.

With the truth finally out, the U.S. could now get on with its duty. It had promised to deliver 225,000,000 bushels of wheat abroad by July 1. Even this amount, in view of the worsening world food crisis, would only alleviate hunger, not cure it.

* Attempting to describe its taste, the Agriculture Department's Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics said it would have "a more wheaty flavor"; it would also be richer in proteins.

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