Enough for Everybody

The British Government put forward its first concrete proposals for postwar international collaboration. Richard Kidston Law, able Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs and youngest son of the late Andrew Bonar Law, presented them as chairman of the British delegation to the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, meeting in Hot Springs, Va.

The assembling of the first United Nations Conference was, as President Roosevelt said, a "historic occasion." But at first, as a result of the President's decision to keep reporters out of it (TIME, March 29, et seq.), it seemed fated to be historic mainly as a circus. Amid the spectacle of 200 military policemen sheepishly guarding the conference hotel day & night against the menace of 50-odd newsmen, the outraged squawks of the reporters and the splutterings of gate-crashing Congressmen, diplomatic dignity took a prattfall. Mr. Roosevelt gradually wilted in his determination to keep the press out. Answering protests against "censorship" and "secret diplomacy," he began the week by suggesting that reporters would soon be wanting to watch him take a bath. But by week's end his press ban had become a face-saving formality.

Ever-Normal Granary. The purpose of the conference, as stated by British Chairman Law and his colleagues in their 3,000-word declaration, is to discuss ways & means of insuring that in the postwar world there will be "enough of the right kind of food for everyone at all times." To accomplish this lofty aim, the British suggested that the whole world abandon the philosophy of scarcity and instead do everything possible to promote maximum production and consumption. Surplus crops would be stored in an international "balancing or buffer stock" (ever-normal granary), from which they would be drawn in lean years. Its managers would balance supply and demand and encourage both production and consumption by the prices at which they bought and sold.

No nation, declared the British, should remain "in permanent dependence on the special help of others." But every nation would get a helping hand from an international research body.

Neither the British delegation nor any other is empowered to reach binding agreements at the conference. The British proposals obviously represented the viewpoint of a nation which has a great underfed colonial empire and which itself consumes far more food than it produces. But they were well worth even the selfish consideration of a great producing nation which has long struggled unsuccessfully with unmanageable surpluses and hunger in the midst of plenty.

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