One Mouthful Less

China's struggle to feed its expanding population has suffered a new setback. Peking announced recently that grain output last year was down 10,000,000 metric tons from a high of 250 million tons in 1971. The reasons for the decline were heavy floods and windstorms in many parts of China and one of the worst droughts in a century in the northern provinces.

The continuing drought threatens to cut into this year's food production as well. To combat this danger, hundreds of thousands of urban office workers are being sent out to work in the countryside. In eastern Shansi province, which has had less than one-fourth of an inch of rain since October (compared with an average annual rainfall of 15 inches), Taiyuan Radio broadcast instructions that "manpower, material and finance be first concentrated on conservation projects that can give benefits this spring." Workers hope to sink 30,000 new wells and install nearly 50,000 pumps in other wells before June.

Thanks to grain imports ordered from Canada and the U.S., China does not face the acute hunger it did in the early 1960s. Nonetheless, the official journal Red Flag has urged every Chinese to eat one mouthful less each day. "In a country with a large population like ours," said the article, "when a person saves a mouthful of grain a day, he will save a peck in a year, and the whole nation will save up to a hundred million catties [50,000 metric tons] of grain."

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