One Man's Meat

Once upon a time, before the Communists took over, Poland produced all trie food it could consume, and had lots left over for sale abroad. But no longer. Now millions of tons of grain must be imported, and fortnight ago Warsaw city officials slapped on a meat ration of roughly 5 lbs. per person per week. This sounded liberal, but the trick was to get it. By last week, queues were forming in front of Poland's butcher shops long before dawn, and generally, by the time half the waiting housewives had made their purchases, the butcher's stock ran out.

For the most part, Poland's food problems today are manmade. In 1956, bowing to the demands of a fierce peasantry, Polish Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka allowed farmers to leave Poland's collectives and return to their private plots. But, Marxist that he is, Gomulka surrounded the peasants with a maze of economic controls. Last year, when the government pegged the price of potatoes too high, the peasants sold their potatoes to the state instead of using them as pig feed, then slaughtered their pigs prematurely, thus sharply reducing the pork supply for 1959. State price fixing produced much the same results with cattle, and on top of all this, a severe drought last summer cut deeply into meager fodder stocks.

Last week, in response to Gomulka's pleas, Russia grudgingly agreed to sell the Poles 3,000 tons of meat--about one day's supply. Greater relief might come from Washington, where visiting Polish Agriculture Minister Edward Ochab was reportedly negotiating for $50 million in U.S. surplus food. But in the long run, Wladyslaw Gomulka and his planners were clearly committed to the proposition that Poland's only salvation lies in a return to collectivization. Difficulty was that they dared not try to bring it back by force, were reduced instead to touting a voluntary system of cooperative "agricultural circles," designed to introduce communal tractors as a subtle step in the direction of collectivization.

Passing through Poland late in the week, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson was asked what he thought of the agricultural-circle idea, responded that in the U.S. "we believe in the strength of the free market and of profit as a driving force in production." When a Polish journalist raised the question of the crop supports that produce the U.S.'s whopping annual food surpluses, Benson was obliged to make some embarrassing qualifications about the free market and subsidized U.S. agriculture. But nobody in Poland doubted for a moment that Wladyslaw Gomulka would cheerfully exchange his own farm problem for Ezra Benson's.

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