Harvest Home

The business of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization is, in the words of Director General Sir John Boyd Orr, to see to it "that the people of the world will never again suffer from famine." Last week, the business at its meeting in Copenhagen was still chiefly organization. Detailed plans for a world food board and international price stabilization would be submitted to member Governments and ultimately to the U.N. Sir John Orr was actually promoting a kind of worldwide A.A.A. to regulate farming globally. The plan was highly controversial. The U.S. State Department was dead set against it.

All over Europe, meanwhile, millions of farmers wondered what had their labor prepared for Europe to eat?

In Italy potatoes were doing better even than before the war and wheat was pretty good. In France, farmers expected the best crops since before the war. In Germany it looked as if the 1946 harvest would be little better than last year's. Rationing will continue on the present minimum subsistence level.

Drowned Hopes. Ireland barely escaped famine. Britain's crops, if not her worst, were the most difficult to harvest within living memory. Prayers for sunshine went unanswered. England's' wheat was a rain-beaten tangle. Under the headline "The Afflictions of Thy People," a London Daily Express bulletin read like a litany of the counties, intoned over drowned hopes: "Norfolk: . . . Corn in stook too wet to be carted. Hopes run low. Devon: Crops ruined; corn sprouting. Somerset: Corn lands waterlogged. . . . Hertfordshire: Fields are as squelching as in winter. . . . Surrey: Position serious. Crops deteriorating daily. . . . Suffolk: No work is possible. . . . Yorkshire: East Riding farmers have worked after sunshine and a drying wind, but general situation is still serious. Oxfordshire: . . . Unless weather improves, not much more than half crops will be harvested...."

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