Food: A Weapon

For the U. S., food distribution is an economic and moral problem. Hitler uses food as a political weapon. Last week, in Foreign Affairs, Economist Karl Brandt listed some of the ingenious and devastating uses to which this weapon has been put by Nazi experts in the last seven years.

At Home & Abroad. Both Stalin and Hitler use food to destroy internal opposition, reward accomplishment, punish failure, establish the class distinctions of their "new orders." In Germany the "warrior caste" of the armed forces gets the fattest ration cards, skilled and essential workmen the next. Down at the bottom come prisoners, the insane, the Jews. Ration cards giving the owner right to more food are used to give workmen incentives to seek promotion, to increase their output. Supplies are suddenly cut down (regardless of the amount stored) to scare the population into believing the situation serious, or extra rations are suddenly granted to boost morale in a bad time. Food statistics are guarded like bomber planes. To the Nazis, food is "a beautiful instrument . . . for maneuvering and disciplining the masses."

Nazis use food to smash their enemies in neutral countries, before trying military occupation. One technique: offers of huge foreign food purchases are suddenly concentrated in a single agricultural country; a fantastically high price is quoted; the offer is broadcast to the hard-pressed farmers, who in turn bring pressure on their Government to accept. In the process, patriotic resistance is undermined; the neutral Government that makes the deal is compelled to pay its farmers in its own currency while waiting payment from Germany. A sudden ending of the demand brings a price slump, followed by farmers' defaulting on taxes and mortgage payments. Says Economist Brandt: "If this German technique were ever tried against the Latin-American countries, it would work magnificently. . . . Hitler . . . could throw every one of those countries into political convulsions and stir up violent hatred against the United States."

The Conquered. Economist Brandt believes that Germans use food to control civilians in German-occupied Europe as they do at home, but that the weapon does not work so efficiently because the machinery is new. To lure skilled workmen to German factories, rations in Dutch, Belgian, Scandinavian, French manufacturing centres are cut, increased in German towns. The amount of food that reaches the public is determined, not by the supply, but according to Nazi strategy. The British blockade, he believes, can not halt the Nazi war machine. He concludes that food will not win the war. "The Nazi machine will be defeated only by superior diplomacy, superior steadfastness and superior military strength."

Two Can Play. Last week there were signs that the U. S. too had begun to recognize food as a weapon, and that it had begun to recognize how mighty a weapon its enormous food reserves could be. But there was little agreement how the weapon should be used.

There was no division about U. S. desire to send food to Britain. Last week at his press conference, President Roosevelt announced that he was working out a program with Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard and Surgeon General Thomas Parran (just back from England), covering Britain's food needs and U. S. ability to supply them. At the Department of Agriculture, experts pointed to U. S. grain reserves (greatest in history), to stocks of fats, oils, hay, meat supplies. If food was a weapon, the U. S. was well armed. Question was: Could the U. S. use this weapon as effectively for democracy as the Nazis use hunger against it?

Other food news of the week:

> The freighter Exmouth, second U. S. relief ship (the first, the Cold Harbor, docked last fortnight at Marseille), sailed for France, carrying 12,000,000 lb. of evaporated and powdered milk, 150,000 articles of clothing for children, 500,000 units of insulin, 20,000 bottles of vitamins -- as well as 12-ft. red crosses on both sides, and floodlights to illuminate them at night.

> Due to sail in two weeks are two French freighters tied up in New York Harbor, with 13,500 tons of white flour (a gift of the U. S. Red Cross). U. S. conditions: 1) the food can go only to unoccupied ports; 2) it must be directly distributed by the Red Cross; 3) "not a single pound" of similar or equivalent food must pass into Occupied France; 4) the ships must return immediately to the U. S.

> Crying "appeasement," 35 prominent liberals, in a letter to Secretary Hull, denounced the release of food to France. Their argument: French industry is working for Hitler; Nazis seized 1,000,000 tons of French wheat to hold in Occupied France; food shipments will undermine the British blockade, lead to Nazi-prompted demands for U. S. feeding of other conquered lands.

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