The Great Potato Famine

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Even with much holding of breath and shutting of eyes, U.S. shoppers last week could hardly believe that potatoes were so scarce they had disappeared from thousands of stores. Only two years ago, they were rotting on farms by the ton. Now there was a flourishing black market, with prices double OPS ceilings. Many wholesalers were selling them only on tie-in sales with onions or other vegetables whose prices are not controlled.

Spaghetti Boom. In Garland, Tex., Fred Harris put up a sign in his cafe: "Potato dinner $1.35. Big Idaho potatoes. Rest of meal free." Elsewhere, other restaurants began offering substitutes. Manhattan's elegant Chambord restaurant prepared to fly in potatoes from wherever they could find them.

Even in the big growing centers, potatoes were scarce. In Elizabeth City, N.C., the chamber of commerce worried lest its annual potato festival, scheduled for this week, be spudless. In Baldwin County, Ala., so many trucks were lined up to grab up the first of the spring crop that the police had to be called out. For the spaghetti and macaroni trade, the shortage was the best news in years. Buffalo's Gioia Macaroni Co. reported its sales had doubled in the past three weeks.

Junked Supports. What caused the great potato famine? Chiefly Washington's planners, who had tried to abrogate the law of supply & demand and had completely disrupted potato growing. In eight years, the Federal Government spent $542 million supporting the price of potatoes. As a result, farmers increased their plantings just to sell to the Government. Two years ago, horrified at the mountains of surplus potatoes, Congress junked the potato support program. Fearful of a price slump, farmers cut their 1951 plantings 20%, even though the demand for potatoes, freed from the artificially high prices of the support program, was increasing.

Five months ago, when many farmers were ready to plant this year's crop, OPS did its bit to discourage planting; it rolled back potato prices (TIME, Jan. 14). To make matters worse, this year's spring crop is late. This week, OPS announced a new move that may well aggravate the shortage, at least temporarily. It found that farmers were bypassing middlemen and selling direct to retailers, thereby taking the entire wholesale mark-up on potatoes of 86-c- per 100 Ibs. OPS will order farmers to cut this out, take no more than 16-c- in markups. Thus farmers will be discouraged from selling potatoes on hand or increasing their plantings. OPS, which has already brought 70 black-marketeers to court, faced trouble of another sort this week: 300 Detroit jobbers went on strike, threw a cordon of trucks around Detroit's Produce Terminal warehouse in protest against government interference.

The only hope for consumers is that the new crop should come to market in a month and end the great potato famine.

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said, "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice" said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

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