Prophecy

Within two years after Germany's defeat, the U.S. will suffer another serious agricultural depression. Once the Allies return to their more normal sources of food supply, huge domestic surpluses will break farm commodity prices right through the Government support levels and will change the U.S. farm problem back to its old form of top-heavy supply.

These predictions hit the ears of the Citizens Board of the University of Chicago like a series of rock-filled snowballs. For the prophet was the University's Theodore W. Schultz, professor of agricultural economics, adviser to the United Nations Food Commission, economic consultant to the Lend-Lease Administration, and general agricultural Pooh-Bah.

Professor Schultz's analysis: food production, up about 25% during the war, will continue at a high level. Lower prices will not cut production, because the forces pushing supply upward are largely independent of price change. Primary among these forces is the rapid advance in farm technology, permitting greater production on fewer acres with less labor.

Nor was the farm prophet impressed by the prospects for increased domestic demand. Even granting a 20% gain in income in ten years after the war, and a 5% population increase, he held that the demand for farm products would gain only 9%, whereas production will increase 15% during the same period.

Professor Schultz offered only one note of relief. He assured his listeners that the agricultural collapse after this war "will not be as precipitous or as great as that which occurred following World War I." Even so, for ten or 20 years after the defeat of Germany, agricultural surpluses will be chronic, said he, relieved only by wars and occasional Government accumulations of large food inventories.

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