Fasting Is Not Enough

Most Americans, though inflation has undeniably shrunk their dollars, celebrated Thanksgiving last week in the midst of a national bounty that remains largely unabated. At the same tune, many people in the world's poorest nations were on the brink of starvation, and an inevitable twinge of conscience accompanied the realization that so little here equals so much there. Boston-based Oxfam-America, an organization devoted to worldwide famine relief, sponsored a recent day-long nationwide fast; the money that would otherwise have been spent on food will provide emergency aid and self-help agricultural programs to needy countries. A number of religious leaders have advocated that such campaigns become a regular feature of the national scene.

Lester R. Brown, a food expert at the Overseas Development Council in Washington, D.C., has suggested that if Americans cut their annual consumption of beef, pork and poultry -- currently estimated at 238 lbs. per capita -- by only 10%, they could supply the rest of the world with an additional 12 million tons of grain to feed the globe's hungry people.

Things are not that simple. Though about 120 million tons of feed grain is consumed annually by all livestock in the U.S., an unconsumed pound of meat does not magically send grain on its way to the hungry abroad. Someone -- almost always the U.S. Government -- must buy the grain and see to its delivery to needy countries. For the moment, President Ford has decided that the current U.S.

pledge of 3.3 million tons of emergency food aid is the most the country can supply without driving up prices intolerably at home.

What is finally most distressing is that there is in fact enough grain in the world now to make up current food deficits if the countries that need it can find the money to buy it. Long-range needs will require that the more affluent nations slow their current gorging, not only of meat but of fuel. And the burgeoning world population, which if left un checked will double within 35 years, must be brought under control. But getting food from where it is most abundant to where it is most needed remains a problem naggingly resistant to easy, conscience-soothing solutions.

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