Crisis in Spring

RELIEF The world will be even hungrier in 1948 than it was in 1947. The crisis will come next April or May. No one need be surprised at news of famine, near-famine, malnutrition and rations cuts; there has been grim and ample warning. The latest prophecy came last week from. Director General Sir John Boyd Orr of the Food and Agriculture Organization who warned, in a year's-end report to the United Nations, that there will continue to be "a food shortage of world magnitude. During the coming year, many in Europe and Asia will die from the direct or indirect effects of food shortage."

Despite the mass killing of war, the world's population had swelled by 8% since 1939 (nearly 200 million more people), but world food production had dropped by 7%. Because of last summer's drought, Europe's grain crop was 8,000,000 tons below last year's. Shipments from the great North American granary will be 2,300,000 tons less in this "cropyear" (ending July 1, 1948) than in the previous year.

The world's great rice exporters -- Burma, Siam, Indo-China -- have never recovered from their wartime agricultural breakdown. This crop-year they will be able to export less than one-third the normal prewar figure. No matter how well it is distributed, this food balance sheet adds up to acute shortage. Two countries, Argentina and the U.S., both more prosperous than they were before the war, might alleviate the crisis, Argentina by charging less, the U.S. by eating less.

The Peron government, which pays Argentine farmers only $1.59 to $1.83 a bushel for wheat, demands from foreign purchasers more than $5 a bushel, payable in hard-to-get U.S. credit. As for the U.S., it had saved next to nothing so far by Charles Luckman's noisy grain conservation plan. The U.S. was still feeding some 90 million tons of grain a year to livestock; a tenth of that would avert next spring's crisis.

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