SUBSISTENCE FOR ALL
BY his broadcast of Monday evening President Roosevelt drew the attention of the world to the importance of the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, which ended last week at Hot Springs, Virginia. The significance of the conference, in fact, derived equally from what it was and from what it. did, and the President gave each of those aspects its proper weight. The fact that for the first time all the 44 United Nations were meeting to concert a concrete programme was calculated to inspire anxiety as well as hope ; open dis- agreements, or compromise decisions designed to veil funda- mental divergencies of view, would be of the worst omen for that international co-operation without which the peace when it comes will be no peace. General agreement, based on unity of conviction, on the other hand, would demonstrate to the world that the first step on the right road had been taken. The demonstration has been forthcoming. All the decisions of the conference were unanimous, and they were taken without any pressure on hesitant or recalcitrant delegations, for the good reason that no hesitation or recalcitrance existed. President Roose- velt has described that result as epoch-making. It is not much less important that the chief Soviet delegate, Mr. Krutikoff, should (as Mr. J. P. R. Maud, the chief British official of the conference, mentioned in his admirable broadcast last Sunday) have claimed that the conference had laid a firm foundation for the future collaboration of nations, and thereby brobght nearer the vic- torious termination of the war. The supreme hope of the Axis Powers is to discover and exploit any sign of a fissure in the Allied ranks. The Hot Springs Conference might have given them, at any rate, some semblance of an opportunity. In the event it confronted them with a unity tested for the first time on such a scale, and proved invulnerable.
But the importance of the fact that agreement was reached depends off the importance of the questions considered. It has been suggested that all the conference did was to lay down admirable principles, and that everything depends on the willing- ness of governments to give effect to them. That, no doubt, is true enough ; but it is true equally that the conference, which itself possessed no executive power, did all it had been asked to do, and did it both competently and expeditiously. The next step lies with the governments, and President Roosevelt gave an influential lead on Monday, when, after quoting the conference recommendation that " the primary responsibility lies with each nation for seeing that its own people have the food needed for health and life ; steps to that end are for national determination ; but each nation can fully achieve its goal only if all work together," declared unequivocally, " on behalf of the United States, I accept this declaration." What does the acceptance of the declara- tion mean? What, to put the question more pertinently, would its acceptance by the British Government, which no doubt will accept it, mean? How far the answer to that question might carry us is perhaps hardly realised, or how closely national action in accordance with the international decisions taken at Hot Springs might be associated with such schemes of _social better- ment as are at this moment being considered in connexion with the Beveridge Report.
The idea underlying the principles formulated at Hot Springs is twofold—and here it may be added parenthetically that the fact that expert discussions pointing to precisely the same con- clusions had been proceeding at Geneva before the war enhances, rather than detracts from, the importance of the Hot Springs proposals. In both cases the inseparable association between nutrition and agriculture was emphasised throughout. If mini- mum standards of nutrition are agreed on, and steps taken by every country to see to it that every one of its citizens gets at least that minimum, such demands will be made on agriculture as to give security everywhere to those primary producers to whom recurrent cycles of shortage and surplus have brought perpetual disaster, and endow them with new purchasing-power whereby industry would benefit equally. The demands, indeed, could prob- ably not be met today. President Roosevelt went so far as to say that no nation has ever had enough food to feed all its people as we now know human beings should be fed. That, no doubt, is true. But it is something that there is today sub- stantial agreement as to how human beings should be fed. Broad accord can be reached on the elements of a balanced dietary in which both the protective and the energy-producing foods have their proper place ; the Hot Springs conference did, indeed, formulate such a dietary in specific terms. But here economic laws governing the relation of consumer and producer become relevant. To feed the world adequately the agriculture of the world must be greatly expanded. That is a problem in itself, but one by no means incapable of solution. But assuming pro- duction on the necessary scale, what guarantee is there that the demand will be such as to absorb the product? It is not enough for the need to exist on the consuming side. Unless the pur- chasing-power is there farmers the world over will be ruined by surpluses that they cannot sell. And since no nation, or very few, is likely to be in a position to get its needs supplied by its own agriculture alone, the problem, as the Hot Springs con- ference pointed out, is international, not national: That difficulty can be met in one way only. Governments must decide whether in the new world which is to be built on the failures of the old they are prepared to accept responsibility, as President Roosevelt has accepted it for the United States, " for seeing that their own people have the food needed for health and life." The answer so far as Great Britain is concerned is not in doubt. The Government, by accepting the Beveridge Report, with reservations which are in no case fundamental, has endorsed the principle that our own people shall at any rate have the money required to buy the food needed for health and life—and. of course, other necessaries like rent and clothing. But the Hot Springs formula, thus approved by President Roosevelt, opens up an interesting field for speculation and discussion. The constitu- tion of a dietary is at least as important as its volume, particularly when the maintenance of minimum standards is concerned. In this country, under what is certainly the best rationing system ever put into operation, we have worked out an adequate and well- balanced dietary, which !las resulted, very remarkably, in a better standard of health than was reached in peace-time. How far can a supply of " the food needed for health and life " be permanently assured to every citizen by the perpetuation of some such system?
That is, no doubt, a question of degree, and two methods of approach are possible. The existing system, or such a system as is accepted in principle by the endorsement of the Beveridge Report, can be taken as starting-point, and extensions of it carefully thought out. Or an imaginary system can be sketched out and brought down to the level of reality by consideration of the prac- tical objections to it. The latter method is worth a moment's consideration in the case of food. What would be the effect of perpetuating a rationing system for the essentials of life—meat, fats, sugar, bread (which, of course, is not at present rationed), and some other commodities, but with the vital Change that the food be supplied on surrender of the coupon without payment?. This method would, incidentally, embody two principles which, on
Previous page
