The Evening Star (April 26, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Food should be rationed
By Dorothy Thompson
What I previously have written about the OPA does not mean that I want to see controls lifted. It only means that if there are to be controls, they must control. The consumption of food must, above all, be controlled, because there is famine over half the globe. But food consumption can only be controlled at the source, and by rationing.
The price of food must have a more rational economic base, and the control must be complete. When, last fall, for instance, controls were lifted that had previously determined the amount of cream to be allotted to ice cream and fancy cheeses, practically the whole cream supply was diverted from butter with its low ceiling price. The ceiling price on the latter is too low. Butter is a luxury. Butter substitutes contain equal nutriment. The ceiling price on choice cuts of meat is too low. America is a steak-chop Nation, but everybody can’t eat steaks and chops because they are a small part of a slaughtered animal. Their price should be in line with their choiceness.
Grain can be diverted from stock feeding – poultry, for instance – only if it, too, is rationed to the farmers. To try to get voluntary collaboration – asking each poultry farmer to reduce his flock by 10 percent – will probably have the opposite effect. Many, counting on reduction by others, will increase their flocks.
But the success of rationing always depends on housewives or farmers actually getting with certainty what is rationed. If it is not otherwise available, they will go to the black market. Rationing always reduces family expenditures for food, even if prices are higher. It eliminates extravagance and waste and is therefore anti-inflationary, if a housewife knows she can get only a limited amount of bread, fats, meats and sugar per week or month, she does not throw anything usable into the garbage can.
If food is rationed, it must, I repeat, be rationed. It is preposterous to ration sugar and not ration candy, ice cream, soda pop containing sugar and sweet bakery goods. I have been unable to get figures on American sugar consumption last year, but when one considers the expenditure of billions for candy, ice cream and sweet soft drinks I seriously doubt whether, despite household rationing of sugar, it was much below prewar.
The rationing of food is essential not only as a hedge against inflation, but because the world is starving and we are falling way behind our commitments. To be sure, the starvation of Europe is partly the result of war, but is even more the result of insane economic policies and mad nationalism. The shifting of frontiers; the expelling of populations; land reforms which violate all agricultural experience; East-European governments which have no power of free action; struggles between Allied powers; radical deindustrialization measures which destroy the economic balance and prevent the manufacture of the machines urgently needed on the land; wholesale looting of livestock and agricultural implements by the Russians; creation in Europe of new closed economies – these policies have brought, and will continue to bring, the inevitable harvest of starvation or near-starvation resulting in decreased work energy and a fall in food production which will be cumulative.
Mr. Hoover reports that the worst food situation is in Poland and Yugoslavia. This is despite the fact that Poland has inherited the great grain lands of German Silesia. But these lands have been seized and broken up in an unmethodical manner. The indigenous land population has been driven off the soil; last year’s crop was not even harvested, so there is grain and potatoes neither for the Germans nor the Poles.
Similar persecutions of populations have had the same result in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The former is normally a rich agricultural land, but apparently Yugoslav youth are spending their energies either in marching and heiling their “liberator” or in building his immense army of 600,000 men. Armies are fed, they do not feed others. Germany was, and could be, 85 percent self-sufficient in food, at a high standard of diet – but there is no German economy, but five isolated economies. Hungary was a great food-exporting nation, but the citizens of Budapest are starving. This is not just the result of the war; it is the result of Allied policies.
America can and must pull in her belt, but as long as politicians and peoples give first priority to hatred and revenge. and insist on continuing the war against political minorities, social classes and defeated peoples, they will have to pay the price, which will be poverty, wretchedness and hunger, and we shall be pouring food into a sieve. The whole “peace” is a mockery of nature and a defiance of natural law. And nature, though disinterested, takes her revenge.