Back to the Farm

The outside world had guessed for some time that Red Chinese agriculture was in serious trouble. Last week Peking's planners admitted it themselves.

After a solemn five-day meeting of the Central Committee, they issued a communique that flatly reversed Chairman Mao Tse-tung's cherished plan to achieve a "big leap" in industry. Instead, the communique called for "appropriately reduced" industrial investments and urged "all sectors and occupations to step up support for agriculture" as "the foundation of the national economy."

Chairman's Plan. What went wrong was not the widely advertised series of "natural calamities"--though the communique talked gloomily of floods and droughts--but Chairman'Mao's own plans. More than two years ago, Mao launched his big push. Every peasant was to be put in a commune. He ordered a 10% cutback in acreage, accompanied by intensive cultivation that would release more manpower for industry. Mechanization and irrigation were supposed to keep the crop yields soaring. But though the new report brags that tractors have tripled, the total still comes to only 60,000 for all of Red China--and a third of these are usually down for repairs. As for irrigation, Peking boasted last year that 90 million irrigated acres had been added since 1957; the planners last week downgraded their figures to 50 million acres and in typical Communist fashion, described this as "tremendous progress."

The result was a bad crop two years in a row, with grain production in 1959 and 1960 running at about 190 million tons, v. a 1960 goal of 297 million. As a cornerstone of the plan for 1961, Peking called for a purge of what it called "landlord and bourgeois elements" who "have not yet been sufficiently remolded." Tacitly conceding that private incentives were necessary, China's planners fell back on what they call the "socialist society's principles of more income for more work." Commune workers would be allowed to raise private pigs and vegetables, were granted a reduced work week and two days off a month, and could go home for lunch instead of eating in the communal hall.

Tough on Birds. All that Peking officially owned up to was that "the production plan in agriculture was not fulfilled in 1960." But Chinese refugees fleeing into Macao reported that food rations in China are so scanty that "even the birds would find it hard to survive." Worried Hong Kong Chinese are shipping more than 100,000 lbs. of food daily to relatives on the mainland. Peking is urgently seeking freight space to import 330,000 tons of wheat from Australia, 350,000 tons of rice from Burma and 120,000 tons of barley from Canada.

In the U.S., there was talk of sending U.S. surplus food stocks to relieve China's problem. But President John Kennedy noted coolly that Peking is still exporting food to Africa and Cuba even in a time of famine, added that "we've had no indication from the Chinese Communists that they would welcome any offer of food."

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