"The Lost 47,000,000 Acres"

The man who helped feed 300,000,000 people in and after World War I bluntly told the U.S. this week that it is failing miserably in its upcoming job of feeding 400,000,000.

Said earnest, foodwise Herbert Hoover, to the Farm Bureau Federation in Manhattan: "If the war in Europe should come to an end within the next twelve months we should have no consequential food supplies with which to meet three or four hundred millions of starving people."

He fixed as the great, underlying fault in U.S. food management: from 1932 to 1939, the acreage in 17 leading crops, comprising 95% of our harvested area, was reduced 47 million acres through Federal restrictions. By 1942, the U.S. had recovered only nine million of the lost acres. To get the remainder back in production is the great 1944 job.

To do so, Hoover called for consolidation of food production and distribution under one administrator; abolition of parities, of retail and wholesale price ceilings (his answer: fix prices close to the farm); an increase in farm manpower by ordering drafted farmers back to the land--"with their uniforms," when needed.

For those who shudder at food shortages now, ex-President Hoover said: "Our cities will have less food during the next winter and spring even than they had in the last few months."

In a backward look at World War I, he said: "We shipped more food to our allies monthly than is being shipped today. We had no black markets. We had a people zealous in a moral crusade to help win the war with food instead of lots of people trying to beat the game."

In a forward look at Capitol Hill, he said tartly: "It would help win the war if left-wing reforms in our food economy were suspended for the duration."

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