The Lonely Furrow

Hardheaded economists saw a good many flaws in the World Food Board Plan devised by Britain's Sir John Boyd Orr, director-general of U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization. But the U.S.'s abrupt rejection of it last week illuminated a more important defect: the inability of U.S. Government departments to agree on policy.

At the Copenhagen FAO conference in September, U.S. Under Secretary of Agriculture Norris E. Dodd (a onetime AAA administrator) violated State Department instructions by plumping "in principle" for the Orr plan, which would 1) stabilize prices of agricultural commodities on world markets; 2) establish a world food reserve for emergencies, and 3) provide funds to finance disposal of surpluses to needy nations.

When FAO's food-board commission met in Washington, Dodd had to eat his words in public, by conforming to the State Department view that control of food (along with other commodities) should be vested in the broader-based, less restrictive International Trade Organization now being established. The fact that Britain's delegate, Harold Wilson, also rejected the Orr plan (though for different reasons) did not remove a widespread impression in London of U.S. irresponsibility.

The Evening Standard ran a bitter cartoon by David Low showing an aloof U.S. ploughing "the lonely furrow" straight across Orr's carefully cultivated world food field. And a Daily Mirror artist savagely crucified an agonized male figure labeled "World Hunger" on two skyscrapers marked "Wall Street," captioned his cartoon: "I thirst . . . and they filled a sponge with vinegar and put it to His mouth."

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