Food in the World Market
At the second annual meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organ- isation a year ago it was proposed that a world food board should be created for the purpose of buying supplies on the international market and making them available to needy countries at prices within their means. The proposal was subsequently dropped, and it was agreed that although the aim was valid the best agency for the necessary market operations would be the Governments of the pro- ducing States. This posed a further question of administration, which is being considered at the third annual meeting which opened at Geneva on Tuesday—namely, how shall the essential link be made between the F.A.O., which is equipped to formulate needs, and the' States who have the power to see that those needs are met? The proposed answer is a world food council, whose members shall be nominated by individual Governments. The need for some such answer is now doubly apparent, for not only are shortages and mal- distribution as bad as ever, but the additional complication of prices too high to clear the supplies available in countries possessing a food surplus is raising once more the old spectre of poverty side by side with plenty. But if the need for an organisgtion to overcome this difficulty is to be met there will have to be a much closer marriage between that broad humanitarian appeal which has always been forthcoming from the F.A.O. and the hard realities of international trade. The fact is that even Governments find it difficult to persuade producers who think they can get high prices that it is both wise and just to take low ones. Nevertheless, the F.A.O. has no alternative but to keep pegging away. If it continues to put forward the arguments of essential common sense and humanity and at the same time to back them up with plain statements of needs, supplies and prices it will succeed in the end. This is one of the many cases in which the moral appeal and the appeal to enlightened self-interest must eventually run together.
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