The War on Hunger

"I propose," urged the President in a special message to Congress last week, "that the United States lead the world in a war against hunger." In that war, he added, "the key to victory is selfhelp. Aid must be accompanied by a major effort on the part of those who receive it. Unless it is, more harm than good can be the end result." So noting, Johnson unveiled his long-awaited pro posal to turn agricultural foreign aid into breadbasket diplomacy.

Dubbed Food for Freedom, the plan would replace the twelve-year Food for Peace program that expires next Dec.

31. Under provisions of that program, the U.S. has disposed of $14 billion worth of surplus food and fiber, last year alone shipped abroad agricultural products worth $2 billion, equal to 40% of all U.S. foreign aid.

Emergency Reserves. Under the new five-year plan, subsidized food shipments overseas would amount to $2.8 billion (including $500 million in technical assistance) the first year, eventually increase to $3.3 billion annually. At the end of five years, recipient nations would have to start paying for American food in dollars instead of soft currencies, thus easing the balance-of-payments problem.

Food stockpiles at home have shrunk $1.3 billion (to $6.7 billion) since 1960, now consist of 818 million bu. of wheat, 55 million tons of feed grains, 7.7 million cwt. of rice, and 126 million Ibs. of dried milk. Pointing out nonetheless that domestic commodity stockpiles "must be large enough to serve as a stabilizing influence and to meet any emergency," Johnson asked Congress to authorize establishment of reserves for certain strategic commodities. Such reserves, he said, would be built up and maintained by Government purchases on the open market rather than relying on accumulation through subsidies and price-support programs, as Charles Shuman (TIME cover, Sept. 3), president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, has long urged.

"Unprecedented Demands." The President also proposed to return to cultivation as many of the 60 million idled acres on U.S. farms as may be needed to meet the world's need for food-"but not to produce unwanted surpluses and not to supplant the efforts of other countries to develop their own agricultural economies." In addition, to meet "unprecedented demands arising out of drought and the war in Asia," Johnson announced a 10% increase in rice acreage in 1966, and said that corn-belt farmers would be encouraged to switch some feed-grain acreage to soybeans, a high-protein oilseed of which the U.S. has virtually no reserve stocks.

Johnson concluded: "Candor requires that I warn you the time is not far off when all the combined production on all the acres of all of the agriculturally productive nations will not meet the food needs of the developing nations unless present trends are changed."

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