How to Feed Europe

The best news in Washington last week had to do with feeding the world. Many a U.S. citizen has feared that his Government would 1) set up the vastest and most hopeless charity scheme in history, 2) earn the usual unhappy reward of the starry-eyed benefactor, 3) make the U.S. people so tired of serving as international milch cow that a new wave of isolationism would sweep the country. Last week brought signs that such fears can be forgotten.

U.S. postwar food policy was setting in a realistic mold. Gone were thoughts of worldwide bread lines or an international WPA. The new principles:

> The U.S. cannot and should not try to feed the world from its own farms and warehouses.

> The maximum program that the U.S. can undertake is to help stricken nations until they can get their own crops planted and harvested. This help must include food to prevent starvation. But the emphasis will be on seed, fertilizer, machinery.

> In most cases, nations helped by the U.S. will be able to repay a substantial part of the bill by swapping their own surplus production.

Trial &. Error. Some Administration officials still gloomily foresee the U.S. citizenry on rations for years while the U.S. ships its food all over the world. But Herbert Lehman's Office of Foreign Relief & Rehabilitation Operations, which has learned the facts of feeding friend & foe in North Africa, has no patience with pessimism.

North Africa was the eye opener. To the spot went OFRRO's able, balding Food Expert Herbert Parisius, 48, who quit the Agriculture Department last January in protest against its do-nothing policies. He found North Africa stripped of food by the Nazis. But the wheat crop was growing high in the sun-baked fields.

Mines in the Wheat. Shipments of 40,000 tons of wheat tided North Africa over its crisis. Expert Feeder Parisius, with a chance to put his production theories into practice, concentrated on the harvest. He got sappers to clear away the mines planted among the wheat. He got oil, binder twine and spare parts for North Africa's farm machinery. To give North Africans an incentive, he urged shipments of U.S. clothing that the workers could buy with money earned in the fields.

With its harvest in, North Africa is now nearly back to normal. Always a grain-exporting region, its grain surplus this year may run as high as 500,000 tons. The French in Tunisia are stockpiling some of it to help feed France if & when. Some of the money the U.S. spent has already been repaid in North African cork, phosphates, iron ore and olive oil. The French have also paid $25,000,000 in cash.

OFRRO was lucky in North Africa: if the fighting had continued another month, most of the harvest would have been lost. But luck aside, OFRRO learned that relief and rehabilitation need not be so expensive as they sound.

Plowshares and Bulls. The luck of "Parse" Parisius and colleagues may not hold, but they are sure now that they know how to speed their job under any circumstances. They figure that 500-600 tons of iron and steel shipped to Greece can be hammered into enough plows and hand tools to produce thousands of times this weight in food. Actually they even plan to build up Occupied Europe's decimated animal population through artificial insemination by U.S. bulls and boars.

In the meantine the feeders expect, by shipping U.S. food where needed, to give citizens in conquered and reconquered countries a diet of 2,000 calories a day (800 more than a starvation diet, 1,200 under the U.S. standard). To OFRRO, this is the least the U.S. can decently do -- and the most it can realistically attempt.

Said one OFRRO spokesman last week : "We want to bring these people back with a minimum of assistance from us in the form of direct relief. We are not deliberately holding down our help. But we know what has to be done and how much we will have to go around.

"We think it's safe to say that the ultimate cost of our program will be a lot less than some people think. Above all, if everything goes as we plan it, we are sure that the diet of the average American will not suffer."

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