The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  That year a shortage of good-quality corn had meant that those poultry and dairy farmers who did not grow their own fodder had bought in wheat to feed their livestock. In addition, farmers with surplus grain were keeping it back on their farms, waiting for prices to rise. The consequence of all this was that the amount of wheat available for relief shipments was below expectations and the quantities kept on falling throughout the winter of 1945–46. It was then that the repercussions of the poor worldwide harvest began to show among the cold and hungry Europeans. Grace Miller, from Montana, was posted to Belgium in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). She described the horror felt by the US army cooks when they had to take ‘a truckload of kitchen garbage to the dumps … [there] a crowd of people always waited to grab anything remotely edible. People with their cups and pans, people who had once been well off, fought to get right under the garbage being spilled out so they could be sure to get something to eat. Every little bone or wilted vegetable was treasured. A mouldy loaf of bread could cause a vicious, clawing fight … “Those people are really desperate,” one cook told me, trying to hide his emotion. “Makes you want to cry,” he added softly, looking away.’13

  In January 1946 the US Department of Agriculture discovered that in the last quarter of 1945 a record quantity of wheat had been consumed in America, mainly by livestock. Thus, they entered the year with a much smaller surplus than usual and higher commitments than ever to export wheat to needy countries. The Truman administration dithered. The longer it prevaricated the more farmers held back their wheat.14 In the end, wheat-saving measures were imposed on industry. The extraction rate of flour was raised to 80 per cent which resulted, to the bakers’ irritation, in a dirty grey loaf. Limits were imposed on the use of wheat to make alcohol, and as feed.15 But Truman and Clinton Anderson, his Food Administrator, decided that rationing should not be re-introduced. Despite public opinion surveys to the contrary, Anderson judged the American public were in no mood to embrace austerity measures with enthusiasm. He was probably right in thinking that this would have made the administration unpopular. Instead, heart-rending appeals were made to the American public to voluntarily restrict their consumption. In a radio broadcast Truman declared, ‘we will not turn our backs on the millions of human beings begging for just a crust of bread. The warm heart of America will respond to the greatest threat of mass starvation in the history of mankind.’16 In the spring of 1946 Herbert Hoover was sent on a whistle-stop Famine Survey, visiting thirty countries in fifty-seven days.17 From Cairo he sent a broadcast to the States in which he compared the generous amounts of food eaten by Americans to the devastating hunger of millions. He urged the American public to give the gift of food and ‘return the lamp of compassion to the world’.18 Appeals of this nature made no impact on American eating habits and by March the United States was 10 per cent down on its agreed food aid targets.19

  Hoover used his world tour to increase pressure on Britain, the Soviet Union and Latin America to provide more food. In March 1945 General Eisenhower had already had to request extra supplies from Britain for Belgium, owing to deficits in the American cargoes.20 During 1945 Britain had released over 1 million tons of its carefully husbanded food reserves for relief for Europe.21 Rationing was extended to bread in order to enable the government to meet Britain’s aid commitments. Canada, struggling with the effects of a poor grain crop, a shortage of fruit and vegetables and a sharp decline in hog production, also demonstrated the political will to ensure that its relief commitments were met, and re-introduced meat rationing in September 1945. Throughout 1946 and 1947 Canadian meat processors produced canned meats, meat pastes, spreads and blood sausage for Europe. The mechanization of the prairie provinces also freed up 40,000 draught horses which were sent to farmers in Poland, Czechoslovakia and France.22 In contrast, throughout the entire period of crisis the United States government proved itself unwilling to act in any way that would disadvantage American agribusiness and the American consumer. On 2 May 1946 Truman pronounced that ‘the heart of the American people will have to solve the world food crisis without resort to compulsion’.23 That year the United States fell short of the grain they had agreed to provide for relief by over 27 million bushels. Between mid-1942 and mid-1946 two-thirds of surplus wheat went to feed livestock. Only one-third was used to provide food relief. If the use of wheat as feed had been maintained at pre-war levels then enough wheat could have been released to export three times as much for food aid. Meanwhile, the increase in civilian food consumption since 1943 accounted for more than the total amount of food sent to UNRRA.24

  In the end the world’s hungry had to make do with less. They scraped along on rations which, as ‘one Italian worker said, were not enough to live on and not enough to die on’.25 Infant mortality rates continued rising in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Austria, Greece and Yugoslavia. In Vienna the rations were reduced to 867 calories a day and the Poles were forced to divert seed grain to human consumption with the inevitable result that spring planting would be reduced.26 Dr Tingfu Tsiang, permanent chairman of the UNRRA Council, complained that China was receiving an inadequate trickle of rice. The 42,800 tons it had been sent in the first quarter of 1946 did not come close to meeting the relief needs of the starving population.27

  A VISION FOR THE FUTURE

  As dispiriting as America’s failure to meet its food aid targets was, the US State Department’s sabotage of plans to co-ordinate a global food policy for the future was possibly even more depressing. The first conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was held in May 1945. The FAO was the product of pre-war planning for reconstruction and arose out of the Hot Springs Conference of 1943. During the war, Roosevelt, keen to find common ground on which the Allies could make positive plans for post-war reconstruction, called for a Conference of the United Nations.* In May 1943 technicians and experts in the areas of agriculture, nutrition, public administration and economics from forty-four of the Allied nations gathered at Hot Springs, Virginia, to set out a post-war agenda for food and agriculture. Many of the delegates feared they had been brought together merely to rubber-stamp policies that had already been decided. But once it became clear that they were being asked to set the agenda, they threw themselves into the conference with enthusiasm.

  Although the nutritionist John Boyd Orr did not attend the conference because the British government still regarded his views as unorthodox, his film World of Plenty was given its first public screening. When at the end of the film Boyd Orr took up Roosevelt’s line and declared that the Allies were fighting ‘a war against want starting with the want of food’, the delegates, many of whom had high hopes for the development of a new attitude to food and agriculture in the post-war world, rose to their feet and cheered.28 Nutritional science had come a long way during the war. By widening the definition of hunger to encompass dietary deficiencies, the nutritionists had widened the social group to which hunger could be applied. Indeed, the whole of society was now implicated in that it had been shown that in order to maintain health it was necessary for everyone to eat healthily. It is difficult to imagine how novel this idea was then because it has become so commonplace now. The conference stated that a new contract had come into being between the citizen, who was expected to eat properly in order to stay healthy, and the state, which was expected to provide its citizens with the means to eat healthily.29

  In World of Plenty Boyd Orr set out his vision for the future. He argued that the food lessons and agricultural techniques learned during the war should be taken and applied to the entire post-war world. The first lesson was that science had made impressive advances and it should now be fully harnessed in order to increase farm yields, particularly in the area of protective foods. The announcer in the film declared: ‘Science has the answer! … Munitions factories must be changed over to make farm machinery. Experts can say what kinds of seeds should be sown; what kinds of fertilizers should be used. And today we have artificial aids for the breeding o
f animals.’30 War had taught Allied governments how to manage and direct agricultural production and control farm and food prices, while it had also developed equitable distribution schemes.31 These strategies should be applied not simply on a national but on an international scale. The effective, if at times somewhat fractious, workings of such intra-government organizations as the Combined Food Board had proven that the Allies were able to co-operate over the production and distribution of food. A similar structure should be put in place to co-ordinate post-war international co-operation, which would ensure that ‘every man, woman and child … shall have enough of the right kind of food to enable them to develop their full and inherited capacity for health and well-being’.32 The Norwegian delegate K. Evang reported delightedly that both the United States and the Soviet Union had voted for post-war co-operation. Evang summed up the conference: ‘If the UN continue their co-operation in peace, the foundation has been laid for well being and health, as well as peace and security. The Hot Springs Conference will then go down in history as a door of hope for mankind.’33

  When the FAO met for the first time in May 1945 John Boyd Orr was elected its first director-general. A year later he announced the Organization’s plan to set up a World Food Board. The idea was to overcome the problem of surpluses, which had dogged pre-war agriculture, by buying up foodstuffs when they were cheap and stockpiling them. This would help to stabilize world food prices and create a food pool from which food aid could be distributed to needy countries.34 The details of the plan still had to be resolved, but, given that the prospect of continued international co-operation seemed feasible, it was an ambitious attempt to ‘reconfigure the world’s political economy by organizing it scientifically, according to human need, not profit’.35 Orr had no intention of stifling the free market. On the contrary, he set out the arguments that the League of Nations had used in the 1930s, that if the world’s industrial productivity were ensured, and people were in employment and could afford to eat well, or, in other words, nutritiously, then this would in turn stimulate demand for the right agricultural products – protective foods such as meat and milk, rather than unwanted mounds of grain – and would guarantee farmers a good income.36 Orr was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949, and he believed that his plan was a counter to the atomic bomb in that it might help to create ‘a cosmopolitan world of plenty and social stability’.37

  Orr’s vision was somewhat Utopian but the idea of world government, of which he was a leading proponent, did not seem unrealistic in the world of the 1940s, when democratic countries were just emerging from the imposition of unprecedented levels of governmental control. At the second FAO conference, held in Copenhagen in September 1946, Britain’s Minister of Food, John Strachey, gave half-hearted support to the scheme. The idea that Britain might have to pay foreign farmers a fair price for their produce threatened the nation’s reliance on cheap food imports. But at this meeting Strachey’s reservations were over-ridden by the enthusiasm of the US delegates. There was disagreement within the American administration over the appropriate response to the plan. While the Department of Agriculture was in favour, the State Department fiercely advocated the preservation of free trade and argued against the proposal. Norris E. Dodd, Under-Secretary for Agriculture, disobeyed his government’s instructions and announced that he would support the setting-up of a World Food Board. Fiorello La Guardia, Director-General of UNRRA, passionately advocated the Board and the conference hurriedly set up a commission to meet in Washington in November to consider the details.38 But at this next meeting Dodd was placed in the embarrassing position of withdrawing American support. Officials in the State Department had worked behind the scenes to ensure that there would be no high-level government support for the proposal. The ‘door of hope’, which had opened at Hot Springs, Virginia, was firmly shut in the face of the nutritionists. The Nation condemned the State Department for its narrow-minded inability to see that there was a difference between ‘restrictive nationalistic controls and international controls which have as their aim stimulation of production and trade’.39

  After months of haggling, the State Department’s preferred strategy of negotiating a reduction in trade barriers through the International Trade Organization eventually fell flat. The one agreement on wheat prices which they were able to negotiate also failed to prevent the accumulation of surpluses. Individual governments, which constantly had to adjust to short-term problems and crises, proved unable to deal both with the problem of over-production and with the distribution of surpluses as aid. By stifling Boyd Orr’s plan, the United States and Great Britain deprived the world of the chance to attempt at least to implement an imaginative solution to the problem of malnutrition and hunger in a world with plenty of food.

  THE SHAPE OF THE POST-WAR FOOD WORLD

  The end of the Second World War was a unique moment when it seemed possible that the international co-operation between the Allies which had been so effective during the war might be maintained and built upon. But the moment quickly passed as the political considerations of the Cold War came to dominate decision-making, and the United States, the clear victor, set the agenda. In post-war America politicians of most political persuasions were united behind the idea that reconversion to a thriving peacetime economy was dependent on the American people going on a spending spree. This would stimulate the economy, maintain employment and incomes, and thus spread the benefits of mass consumerism to the entire society. The success of this strategy was dependent on a world trading structure which opened up global markets to American goods.40 In post-war Europe it became increasingly clear that this model of a new world was in direct competition with that of the communist Soviet Union. Food quickly became a weapon in the new Cold War. In May 1946 the Washington Post reported that non-communist French politicians had approached the British asking for a wheat loan so that no cut in the bread ration would have to be made before the elections to the provisional National Assembly in June. In a counter-measure, designed to increase support for the communists, Stalin offered France 500,000 tons of grain. In 1947 the United States decided to channel food aid to Europe through grants rather than UNRRA, and this was seen as a sign of their reluctance to continue funding the feeding of eastern European populations under Soviet influence.41

  By 1947, hungry, chaotic Germany was a political and economic vacuum in the centre of Europe and it was apparent that the country’s fate would decide the speed of general European economic recovery.42 Few Germans realized that they were suffering only a fraction of the misery the National Socialists had inflicted on occupied peoples in their name. They felt despair and also resentment that the occupying powers were failing to provide them with enough food. In February 1947 hunger protests began in the Ruhr area and spread to the Rhineland and the towns of Westphalia. On 3 April, 300,000 miners protested because of hunger, and sporadic unrest continued into the summer.43 After another hard winter the protests began again in early 1948, starting in the Ruhr area and spreading to Hamburg, where thousands of dock workers went on strike. In Bavaria workers held a one-day general strike. The protests were becoming increasingly well organized and co-ordinated. In May 1948, 100,000 workers in Lower Saxony went on strike for two weeks.44 In fact, the strikes were ‘less a sign of political mobilization than of grave demoralization’, but the Americans grew increasingly worried that the German population was becoming radicalized and open to communism.45

  General Lucius Clay, military governor of the US zone, argued that ‘unless we could restore some sort of economic opportunity to the German people, there was nothing we could do to prevent Communism from taking over’.46 The German economy was crippled by inflation, which made money worthless, and a series of price controls which meant that there was very little incentive for farmers or industry to produce food and goods. Workers spent many hours out in the countryside bartering for food rather than at work in the factories. Clay was persuaded by Ludwig Erhard, a member of the anti-Nazi social free-market sc
hool of economics at the University of Freiberg, and adviser to the US administration in occupied Germany, to introduce a number of monetary reforms to address these problems. On 20 June 1948 the French, British and American zones introduced currency reform. The amount of money in the economic system was reduced and the new German marks retained their value. Many of the old National Socialist price controls were also eliminated and, with the price caps lifted on foodstuffs such as vegetables, fruit and eggs, it was now worth the farmers’ while to produce for the wider market. Overnight, foodstuffs which shopkeepers had been hoarding in anticipation of the currency reform appeared in the shops and the barter economy was stifled. In July Erhard exceeded his authority and abolished rationing. When reprimanded, he is said to have responded, ‘henceforth the only rationing ticket the people will need will be the German mark. And they will work hard to get these German marks, just wait and see.’47 He was proved right, as absenteeism rates in the factories declined. The workers no longer needed to spend long days searching for food in the countryside and it was now worthwhile to work for a wage. Money had been restored as the medium of exchange and as the motivational force for economic activity and this established a firm foundation for economic recovery. In 1949 Erhard was appointed Minister of Economics in Konrad Adenauer’s new government.