Between the Green and Yellow

In China, it would be ching huan pu chieh, the time between the green and the yellow. In Poland, it would be na przednowku, the time-before the new. Soon, peasants in many hungry lands would have finished their spring planting; dreaded months of waiting were ahead. For until the seed bore fruit and the crop was in, how would the peasants and their city brethren live?

Politics of Relief. This week, the men whose job it is to feed the world's hungry millions gather in the fourth Council of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration at Atlantic City's lush Traymore Hotel. To soften the contrast between the locale and the subject of their discussions, UNRRA officials announced that the delegates would have to double up in $16.50-a-day rooms, would be served "austerity" meals. Two crucial issues would come up at the meeting:

P: Complaints against high food allocations to ex-enemy countries like Italy and Austria. (Never self-sufficient, these countries receive comparatively larger caloric contributions than countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which were capable, in normal times, of feeding themselves.)

P: Russian charges that UNRRA funds were being used to feed anti-Soviet D.P.s who refuse to return to Russia (inevitably countered by U.S.-British charges that UNRRA aid in Russia's vassal states is being used to bolster Communist regimes).

Deadline Ahead. Against the world's titanic misery, which would easily dwarf even the biggest achievement, UNRRA has achieved a great deal. It has helped feed, clothe and repatriate some 5,000,000 of 6,500,000 D.P.s in Allied Europe, has channeled some 2,000,000 tons of food, fuel, medicine, machinery, second-hand locomotives and other supplies, has begun its rehabilitation task by distributing hoes, plows and draft horses to destitute peasants of two continents. UNRRA's biggest rehabilitation project was progressing at breakneck speed in China, where U.S. Seabees and 150,000 Chinese laborers last week worked day & night to repair the war-torn Yellow River dyke. If UNRRA succeeds in restoring the dyke before June, some 7,500,000 bushels of grain will be saved from the river's ravaging floods.

UNRRA's charter expires at year's end, except in China, where it continues through March 1947. Perhaps the gravest of all issues facing UNRRA was the question of its extension beyond the appointed deadline. The Atlantic City conference would not decide the point, but UNRRA officials were acutely conscious of it. Caustic critics clamored for its demise; but whatever UNRRA's faults, it was clear that some agency was needed to carry out its functions. By the time the green turns into yellow, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania should be able to produce most of their own food. But Greece, Italy, Austria and many another country in Europe and Asia will need relief for years to come.

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