Bare Cupboards

Its agriculture crippled by just about everything that a hard winter and the perversity of man can do, Europe faces a famine this winter that may well be worse than any ever known in the Old World. No man knew this better than Quaker Herbert Hoover, who 25 years ago had the job of keeping Europe's children fed (see cut). Wrote onetime President Hoover in Liberty last week: "The food situation in the present war is already more desperate than at the same stage in the World War. ... If this war is long continued, there is but one implacable end . . . the greatest famine in history." Foreign experts of the Department of Agriculture reached pretty much the same conclusion. The blockade by Allied men-of-war, tightened rather than weakened by Nazi gains in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, taxed the stamina of Central Europe. As additional Channel ports fell into Nazi hands the prospect of a severe counter-blockade by Nazi U-boats and planes threatened Great Britain. >Germany expected to loot enough to eat till autumn, hoped by then to have conquered enough more to master next winter's problem. Otherwise the Nazis looked to be in for it. Seventeen per cent short of food self-sufficiency, the Reich has brigaded its appetite, lived off stored-up peacetime surpluses. It lacks men enough to till its own fields, has had to summon 30,000 agricultural laborers from Italy and import thousands of Polish slaves. Nor can Denmark and Norway be expected to make up Germany's food deficit. Norwegian peasants scrape so little from their rocky slopes that Norway is accustomed to import more than half its food supply. Even Denmark, where agriculture is an industry, relies on overseas trade for 13% of its fodder. Densely populated Belgium and The Netherlands supply but half and two-thirds respectively of their own food wants. Already Germany has found it necessary to send 40 cars fitted for emergency relief service into occupied Belgium and France; while the Dutch have ruined much of their arable land by opening the dikes against the Nazi invasion, and may soon have to slaughter their livestock for lack of fodder.

Poland, systematically stripped of food and farmers, is no place to find wheat and rye that Berlin will need next winter.

)The Balkans have their own food problem, for lower Danube floods, hard upon a cruel winter, devastated their plains and prevented spring planting. In Rumania farm hands were still mobilized in the Army. Even if Nazi Negotiator Dr.

Clodius had money as well as threats with which to buy their produce, wheat-growing Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania would themselves need what they could raise. All through eastern Europe, even in Soviet Russia, peasants moaned that crops would be short.

>For the Allies, the prospect of wartime hunger, always potential but never too imminent, had grown much more real last week. Though France could always find food for herself (but not for 5,000,000 refugees), she lacked farm hands, was far behind both in plowing and sowing. England could always import hers so long as she had the $1,610,000,000 to meet the annual bill. Last week the Londoner still had his bacon & eggs, the Parisian his pain beune. But Englishmen were at last beginning to see that Master-Farmer David Lloyd George was right: they must plow their pasturage and "dig for victory." Seeking also to cut home consumption not only of food but of nonessential articles, the Board of Trade restricted by two-thirds the supply of 600 such items as brassieres, suspenders, pajamas, floral waters and pomades; hoped thereby to release factories and labor (see p. jj) for war production. At the same time, London's posh Savoy Grill served its last supper, shut up shop "for economic reasons." Only bright news to a nation sternly taking in its belt: this year's strawberry crop is "the best since William the Conqueror."

>With funds and fleet bigger than ever since The Netherlands and Belgium had joined them, the Allies were not to be starved so long as the Nazis would let them trade overseas. Canadian bins held enough wheat to feed the Allies for a year. Experts reckoned the U. S. would have 346,000,000 bu. of wheat, 266,352,000 Ib. of lard, 692,000,000 bu. of fodder corn in its storehouses this autumn. Last week Hoover's Committee, the Aldrich Committee, the Red Cross and Friends Service Committee were all gathering funds to feed war refugees now in France. For, whether they got paid for their help or not, whether they were in the war or out, Americans are very unlikely to let anybody in Great Britain and France go short of food. As to the other side, hunger was plainly Foe No. 2.

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