Support for the World?

To ease the tremendous strain of food demands on the U.S., Secretary of Agriculture Clinton P. Anderson last week came up with an idea: foreign countries should place their food orders well before crops are planted so that production rather than prices will be stimulated. And the U.S., in turn, should place its orders for food in foreign countries in advance of planting time.

At first hearing, this sounded plausible and easy to do. But it was only the semantic sugar on the pill of Anderson's program for "spreading the risk of world recovery." The pill was disclosed a few days later in his testimony before Congress' Joint Committee on the Economic Report. Anderson asked for authority to supply foreign nations with machinery, fertilizer, information, etc. More important, he wanted the scope of the Government's Commodity Credit Corp. enlarged so that it could finance the planting, growing and harvesting of crops and enter into contracts to purchase crops at mutually agreed prices.

In effect, the Administration wanted something suspiciously like the U.S. support program for farm prices around the globe. It was convinced that the U.S., which supplied 52.4% of world grain exports in the last crop year, must be a big supplier of food to the rest of the world for a long time. Government officials think it would be safer--in case of a U.S. crop failure--and cheaper to draw other nations into the food pool, even though their crops must be supported by U.S. purchases. How much would this cost? Star-gazing Mr. Anderson did not say, but the U.S. support programs cost the Government nearly $800 million last year.

During the war, CCC had used its funds for such foreign food purchases under a 1942 directive of President Roosevelt. But with the war over, CCC officials have been wary of doing so without a specific directive from Congress. Whether Congress would pass such a program depends on how bad the world food shortage becomes.

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