Food for the World

...Unless the immediate follow-up is action on this human problem that faces the world now, the conference's plans for the future will turn to ashes, the effort will have been a costly failure, and we will have dependence without end...

...The Plan's 85 recommendations were consolidated into ten draft resolutions covering food production, food aid and food trade, and presented to the assembled delegates in Rome by Mr...

...But when the Congressional members of the Rome delegation prevailed on Secretary Butz to send the White House a telegram asking for an immediate increase of one million tons of food aid (about $175 million) which they could announce in Rome, the President delayed for a week before rejecting the request...

...In general, the Conference was a serious, even somber affair...

...2) What needs to be done next...

...The 1250 representatives of the 130-odd countries who made up the official delegations, the 150 UN representatives, and the 300 NGO observers were genuinely concerned about the human tragedy which the Conference was designed to prevent in the future and relieve in the present...

...A third step would be for the governments of both donor and recipient countries to make the internal political decisions to enable the immediate provision of food to the starving and the beginning of the essential rural development that should prevent starvation and improve the quality of life in the future...

...has provided $25 billion worth of food aid in the 20 years since PL-480 got into the stature books --84 percent of the world's food aid during the past decade...

...Moreover, it was a conference not about an abstraction called hunger, but about the concrete reality of hungry people...

...Originally shot for television as six one-hour episodes, the film has here been edited down, by Bergman himself, to a long feature film...

...3) What should be the U.S...

...Assessment and implementation of its results, however, will take time, effort and a review of priorities...

...When the preparations for the Conference began, there were many who feared that it would not address the long-range development problems in whose context the food problem must be solved, but that it might concentrate so heavily on allocating the current relief responsibilities that it would ignore the underlying development thesis...

...A second step should be to establish the ground rules for the world food reserve and the machinery (World Food Council and auxiliaries) to monitor it...

...Let these people breed less, complain less, beg less and work more so that they can earn their food...

...it cannot be solved by writing out a check, but demands changes in personal ways of living...

...As we left the theater I think there was a momentary feeling of camaraderie among us, as if we had just been rescued after spending our three hours together circling on a disabled airliner or trapped in a mine on the verge of cave-in...

...That awareness was accentuated by the visible and dramatic increase of starvation and malnutrition in the "hunger highway" that spans the world along the equator including parts of Central America, the Sahelian zone of Africa, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the populous countries of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh...

...However, it must be noted that the blame lies with the national governments who have all the representation and power within the UN, and who simply use it to further their own narrow self-interest and national ideologies, and of course the ultimate blame can be placed on the citizens of these nations through their apathy or actual support of current international power politics and the subsequent arms race, exploitation, and balance of terror...

...Among the several questions with which those who assert the responsibility of the United States to take the lead in relieving world hunger are often faced, one of the most common is: Why is it our problem...

...Finally, machinery was proposed to coordinate ongoing activities and monitor the implementation of these results and the administration of an agricultural development fund--a World Food Council which will work on these matters in close conjunction with the existing UN agencies...

...3, This leads us to our third consideration, the role Commonweal: 267 of the United States...

...weapons to other countries, beginning with the 1975 Defense Department budget...

...One cannot quarrel with these sentiments, though they are hardly revolutionary...

...this will require more open disclosure by the USSR of its stockpiles and crop projections...

...And one immediate and crucial goal in this country, aside from achieving a dramatic reduction of the Pentagon budget, is to support a move now in Congress to aim at curtailing the flow of U.S...

...Ba ~ on o~hers, on which the Administration could act wfihout waiting for others (the President does not need an appropriation for food aid) or in which our national economic interest seemed threatened, as on trade (which we insisted should be discussed in other forums, like GATT, in the absence of most of the more clamorous countries) we dragged our feet...

...On the substantive side, what makes the Conference important as well is that it achieved very significant results--at least for the medium and long term...

...That limit is the requirement of justice, a just world order, a just distribution of the fruits of God's creation...

...But it is only the beginning of understanding...

...Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz has added his own brand of analysis and rhetoric at the Conference and since, pointing out that the US...

...it is not in the future only, but painfully in the present...

...The Conference was a beginning, not an end...

...Perhaps the Chinese are right in saying, as is reported, that the world may not be able to afford a United States...

...Food FOR THE wonLn MARTIN M. McLAUGHLIN A serious, even somber conference in Rome The World Food Conference, which closed ceremonially in the cavernous marble and glass Palazzo dai Congressi on the outskirts of Rome as midnight approached on November 16, may have been the most widely reported, as well as the most important, international conference in recent times...

...Yet there are several senses in which that can be said about I MARTIN M. MCLAUGHLIN, a former AID o~cial, is a Senior Fellow at the Overseas Development Council in Washington...

...We sold a quarter of the wheat crop in 1972 to the Soviet Union and contemplated selling another four million tons this year to be fed largely to animals...

...But there is a limit to the satisfaction of the consumers' wants and the producers' profit drive...

...The greatest challenge now facing every concerned person is to enjoin the arms race and to take whatever steps are necessary to transform the United Nations into the representative world institution we must have to achieve disarmament, peace and a coordinated attack on the severe global problems of hunger, environmental depletion, poverty and human exploitation...

...What is needed is decisive leadership by President Ford, listening more to his conscience and his compassion than to his inflation-blinded economic advisers, and a continuing campaign of public education on this issue, capitalizing on the reporting already done, to assure the President of the support of the American people...

...But beyond all that, it is our problem for other reasons: U.S...

...the heartrending eye-witness accounts of hunger and death moved many to tears, but few to action...

...food ~tid commitment, it is very doubtful that a signifi~ ant move toward immediate relief will be made...

...without American technology we could not envision the kind of improvement of developing-country agriculture that the World Food Conference calls for...

...Like people that had suddenly found themselves going over rapids in a flimsy boat, we were all hanging onto each other with a startled mixture of exhilaration and dread...

...We deliberately eliminated our carryover stocks and held land out of production in the face of increasing signs of food shortage and the destabilizing of cereal prices...

...I realized that the room was full of couples who were clinging to each other for dear life...

...In 1963, President Kennedy made a similar comment about eliminating hunger from the face of the earth in our lifetime, and the analysis of the current situation cogently set forth in the Secretary's Rome speech has become almost a commonplace in the past year...

...It was a grueling experience, watching that film, though in the end one felt somehow glad to be alive--not in the sense of being full of optimism, certainly, but just in the sense of being glad to have survived the experience...

...One felt as if the whole theater were going over these rapids, and might shake apart at any moment from the sheer force of what we saw before us on the screen...

...We waste, we overconsume (except in our own poverty sectors) and we boast about it...

...We have encouraged beef consumption in developing countries, certainly the least efficient way to obtain needed protein...

...Behind the rhetoric of the delegates of 130 nations assembled in Rome that is what the World Food Conference was about...

...To whom much has been given much will be required...

...We did not live up to Secretary Kissinger's words about a "global trust" and a clear responsibility, and we thus undermined the value of our more affirmative stands on other issues...

...and the shape of the Conference almost entirely reversed itself, so that in the end its concentration was on the more distant future...

...In the meantime, at the beginning of this post-Conference period, three fundamental questions need immediate attention: 1) What did the Conference achieve...

...As Father Theodore Hesburgh, President of the University of Notre Dame and chairman of the Board of Overseas Development Council, said in a November 22 press conference in Washington, the hungry people of the world--as well as those of us who need to be informed about this human catastrophe--owe a special vote of thanks for the kind of education the press had been doing the last six months, particularly at the World Food Conference...

...policies in the past few years have unintentionally accentuated world hunger...

...the package should include sales on concessional terms where the recipient countries have the foreign exchange or the income-producing ability to cover some of the costs...

...On the other hand, the film also presents scenes in the emotional sensemin the sense of "having a scene"--and in this regard it is a completely coherent, self-contained, finished event...

...Without a major U.S...

...We were eloquently affirmative on those issues, such as production increases and information exchange, which require action or collaboration by others---the Congress, the USSR, the 'EEC, the international financial institutions, OPEC countries, or the developing countries themselves...

...What is needed now, however, is not words---- however eloquent or historically accurate--but deeds...

...it is hoped that this will not simply produce another slow-moving international bureaucracy...

...The attention it has received must not be dissipated in a shift to other concerns...

...But the ultimate determinant of aid has to be need, not the ability to pay...

...We put 15 percent of our food in the garbage, consume 35 percent of the world's resources (with 6 percent of its population) discard millions of tons of glass, paper and metal containers, drive gas-guzzling automobiles, squander 15 percent of our fertilizer in ornamental uses, and in the past decade have added the equivalent of the entire diet of an Indian to our individual food consumption...

...But we can affect our own consumption habits, which are putting a greater incremental strain (at lease onethird) on the world's food supply than any other single factor...

...The film is on the one hand little more than some dramatic scenes...

...Nearly 1200 journalists were on hand for the eleven-clay event, testifying to the remarkable interest that the problem of world hunger has generated, particularly in the developed world, during the past year...

...From the overall development point of view, too, even a slight increase in the economic viability of the poor farmer in the countryside (e.g., a doubling of his meager income) would have social and psychological value far in excess of the economic gain...

...One might point out that hunger and hopelessness do more to increase population growth than food and work, that those who are malnourished and starving do not have the energy to work, and that those who see no future have no incentive...

...This was followed up by an eloquent appeal to the Special UNGA session in April and, most .recently and aptly, by the Secretary's address to the Conference itself on November 5. On that occasion he said, among other things: "We meet to address man's most fundamental need . . . No social system, ideology or principle of justice can tolerate a world in which the spiritual and physical potential of hundreds of millions is stunted from elemental hunger or inadequate nutrition . . . A handful of countries, through good fortune and technology, can produce more than they need and thus are able to export . . . President Ford has instructed me to declare on behalf of the United States: We regard our good fortune and strength in the field of food as a global trust . . . The profound promise of our era is that for the first time we may have the technical capacity to free mankind from the scourge of hunger . . . Our responsibility is clear...

...Accompanying these substantive actions must be the continuation and deepening of the educational process already begun...

...it is not remote, but near at hand...

...Through the press and the electronic media the human catastrophe of hunger, starvation and death has gripped the attention of the world...

...All of this preparatory study represents an educational effort by the UN system and by the 130 countries that has further accentuated the interest in and attention paid to the problem of world hunger...

...Marei as the Conference opened...

...The problem of world hunger is not academic, but real...

...According to the FAO assessment document prepared for the Conference, nearly half a billion people (460 million) living in those countries are malnourished or facing starvation now...

...We have used food as a political weapon, the best "tool in the kit of American diplomacy," as Secretary Butz said several times at Rome...

...We have resisted trade adjustments that would help agricultural production in the developing world...

...Delegates from those areas spoke poignantly of the human disaster that they have already witnessed and expect to face even more massively in the near future...

...he leadership the world looked to this country for at Rome was not forthcoming...

...Approval was announced for an increased exchange of agricultural information and an early-warning system, without which no reserve system can work successfully...

...The educational value was underlined by the work of 20 December 1974:266 governments and private groups in preparation for the Conference...

...We cannot, of course, directly affect weather or 20 December 1974:268 the family-size decisions of people in these countries...

...Once the event was scheduled, a preparatory committee was established, together with a special staff in the UN, headed by Sayed Marei, former Minister of Agriculture of Egypt, who served as Secretary General of the Conference...

...the World Food Conference...

...The first, of course, is to reach an agreement on food aid and begin shipments to the most severely affected countries to stem already rising death rates...

...Without the American consumer the incentive for both agricultural productivity and technological advance would not be present...

...There is really no alternative other than a disaster beyond our historical comprehension...

...The Preparatory Committee met three times (in New York, Geneva and Rome), and approved the FAO World Food Assessment and the Action Plan, the two basic documents forming the agenda for the Conference...

...It should be remembered that among those who issued the earliest call for the World Food Conference was Secretary of State Kissinger in his tint major address to the United Nations General Assembly in September, 1973...

...we cannot ration life through the price mechanism...

...Further, the role of the United Nations in this area is a sad commentary on the inability of this world organizationmas now constituted--to deal effectively with serious pohtieal and peacekeeping problems...

...ana without such a move, the plans for the future lose credibility...

...Notwithstanding the efforts made by many delegates and advisers, no firm pledge of concerted short-run food aid came from the Conference...

...Reflecting the observations of the hundreds of reporters present, including American radio and television stations, coverage in this country, especially in those segments of the press that regularly deal with international affairs, was truly phenomenal...

...Despite this progress in the longer range, however, the Conference did not meet the crucial, immediate need described in the FAO assessment: the hundreds of millions of people in the hunger belt who must be helped now unless they are to be sacrificed to longer-range emphasis, hardly a humane solution...

...In contrast to the World Population Conference in Bucharest, where we pushed for specific quantitative targets for reducing the LDC population growth rate, the U.S...

...Without the American farmer's fantastic productivity we could not even discuss the possibility of averting world famine...

...It is also sensible from an economic point of view, because the incremental cost of increasing yield in those regions is far less than in the developed world...

...As the first worldwide intergovernmental conference on this problem, it commanded considerable attention on its own...

...PILLOW TALK 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN OO At one point during Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, the emotional state of the audience at the film, and the very theater where I was watching it, unexpectedly came into my mind...

...Such a ban could mark a first step in transforming our own society into one which places life and human values as its first interest and priority...

...However much we say about how others must share the responsibility, we remain the breadbasket of the woddmand will be such for some time to come...

...If, however, the future vision can be accompanied by an urgent sense of moral responsibility and underscored by an immediate food-aid program for these people as the basic prerequisite of a total onslaught on this age-old scourge, the Rome Conference may be judged a historic turning point in establishing a new and orderly system in its realm of food policy and action that will endure for generations...

...9 All this is said not in condemnation of the United States, but to appeal to our collective conscience...

...These circumstances are no more their fault than the benevolence of nature in this country, for which many of us have recently given thanks by eating more at one meal than they will consume in a week, is ours...

...2. There are a number of next steps that should be undertaken rapidly...

...1. It is becoming a cllch6 nowadays to say that an event was a good thing merely because it was held...

...delegation at Rome rejected all quantitative targets for nutrition programs, fertilizer set aside, emergency relief and food aid...

...There is much evidence that a citizenry tired of Vietnam and Watergate would respond to an appeal for a positive effort--almost a moral crusade-and it would be in the finest, most generous American tradition...

...We should not fail the global trust of which Secretary Kissinger spoke...

...But the English-language title is good nonetheless because of the pun on "scenes...

...It is only a rough working up of an idea for a play in the same way that life itself is just an improvisation on an idea which would need much more refinement and polish to succeed on the stage...

...I suspect that the original Swedish title of the film was something other than Scenes from a Marriage, which seems intended partly as an apology for the fragmentary state in which we are seeing the work...

...the producing nations were scheduled to meet with the most serious deficit nations on November 29 in Rome as the first follow-up of the Conference...

...In those countries, such as ours, where democratic processes still prevail, the public must not be allowed to lose sight of this drama in which it has so suddenly and forcibly been caught up...

...The long-range proposals will not help the presently starving millions who will not survive to the next harvest...

...Affirmative American participation is essential for such a result...

...A world food reserve system was accepted in principle with an agreed ten-million-ton minimum to be replenished annually, and the machinery established to set it in motion...

...it will not go away, but rather worsen without an immediate commitment...

...It is a Commonweal: 269...

...There was universal agreement on the urgent necessity to improve agricultural production in the food-deficit countries, since everyone understands that the only long-range solution is to have them move closer to self-sufficiency in food...

...Unfortunately for the hopefulness of the long-range plans, their credibility hinges on what is to be done immediately...

...All that happens in the film, really, is talk...

...As the world food situation worsened during the intervening months, however, the preparations did not reflect this parallel deterioration...

...We have to act now: no more grain is going to become available here this year, there is no harvest in the less developed countries until late spring, and every passing day sees more grain committed to commercial purchasers...