Can Europe Feed Herself?
SOMEWHERE around 540 million people have been living in recent years on the continent of Europe — 400 million of these outside of Russia. Another 50 million have been living in the United Kingdom and Eire. The United Kingdom has been producing about 30 per cent of its foodstuffs. Eire imports most of its wheat, and much feed concentrate for its cattle and swine. Russia is still an unknown, but is not likely to figure largely in the present situation. The rest of the continent has normally been importing around 38 million tons, or 10 per cent, of the 380 million tons of food and feed which it annually consumes. Its livestock production has been dependent upon 6 million tons of feed concentrates, of which all but 4 per cent has been imported, and nearly 8 million tons of corn imports — both included in the 38 million.
Since last winter possibly thirty million of the most able-bodied workers of Europe have been under arms much of the time, and as many more have been engaged in supplying these with armaments and munitions. Farm workers have not been spared. Farm tractors and trucks have mostly been either in war service or idle for want of gasoline. Farm horses have been taken from the fields to the cities to haul the trucks. A familiar sight in some cities is a team of horses hitched by a makeshift wagon tongue and whiffletrees to the front axle of a motor truck. Horses are reported to be selling as high as 2000 kroner in Denmark.
Given such a situation, one cannot doubt that food will be scarce next winter on the mainland of Europe. Nothing less than stark famine, if the continent is still under blockade, is the way journalists have been forecasting it. Europe threatens to become the greatest famine area in all time, a traveler recently home from Europe reported in the June Mercury. Mr. Herbert Hoover, whose broad interest in hungry people the world has not forgot, has recently given to the press the statement that the city of Brussels will be without food in thirty to sixty days. Spain has been upon a short bread ration for some time.
The agencies in our federal government concerned with this situation have not been quiescent. The foreign commercial and agricultural attachés have reported whatever figures and facts they have been able to find. The Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations has put these reports into tables parallel with carefully compiled statistics of normal production, imports, and consumption of the different foods and feeds. What follows is the best summary of the returns that can now be made. The data are of course less complete and accurate than usual. The effects on production of a shortage of men, fertilizers, and power are beyond the ordinary experience of crop reporters and consulates. And the reports are not strictly current. One can only guess at the destruction of crops and livestock wrought by the invasions of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
First in any discussion of Europe’s food supply must come wheat. The consumption of it on the continent, outside of Russia, has been running around two billion bushels, of which one seventh has been imported. The latest report on the new crop, in The Wheat Situation of June 26, indicates a harvest, so far as planting and weather conditions are involved, not more than 400 million bushels short of normal. Military operations may cut off another hundred million or two. To consume wheat at the pre-thiswar rate would require imports before next July of perhaps 700 or 800 million bushels. Then there is the further circumstance that armies in the field, and men working long hours in heavy industries, consume a fourth more food than ordinary workers. We know which will be fed first.
By countries, the important Rumanian acreage is 18 per cent under last year’s; Yugoslavia’s is low also, but not so much. (The flood damage was not so great as first reported.) Hungary, another large producer, has a poor crop because of adverse weather. Bulgaria has only a fair crop. The German and Swedish crops are said to be well below normal in condition. In most of Europe the winter was very severe and the spring has been backward. In Italy, Spain, and France, however, the weather has improved so much in the last month that acre yields are expected to be good. Italy and Spain each expect to have about enough wheat for next year’s need. France’s normal production of wheat, and rye does not quite balance her consumption. The heaviest fighting was in the most productive areas.
But we must not let our thinking focus too much on wheat. The continent, again outside of Russia, commonly consumes almost half as much rye as wheat, and imports very little of this. It produces 86 per cent of the 2650 million bushels of barley and oats it annually utilizes, some of it directly as human food. The weather and the war seem not to have cut in on these crops, taken as a whole, as severely as upon the wheat crop. Rye stands bad winters better than wheat, and spring grains recover fast from late plantings. The reports upon the corn crop arc not of much use as early as this. About a fourth of the billion bushels consumed is imported.
Europe is a land populous with livestock. It has more cattle, hogs, and sheep than all North America. They live and produce on the grass and clover that thrive in its northern latitudes, on the large output of oats and barley, and of corn in southeastern Europe, and on the large imports of oil cake, cottonseed meal, corn, and other rich feeds. The present war started with 15 per cent more hogs on the continent than at the beginning of the World War, and 10 per cent more cattle; also more than in recent years. But shipping space has been needed since last winter for more valuable commodities than cattle feed. The Danes, for example, have had only a third of their usual imports of concentrates, and none since the German occupation. They are also prohibited from feeding wheat and rye to livestock. Milk production has fallen somewhat, but of course not proportionally. A decline of 10 per cent in butter output in Denmark may be typical.
Hogs are being slaughtered more rapidly than usual. Cattle will be slaughtered freely also — especially beef cattle. If the rye, barley, oats, and corn of Europe were fed to livestock, it would take five pounds of them to produce one pound of human food in the form of milk (reckoned as dry matter), eight pounds in the form of pork and lard, fifteen pounds as eggs and poultry meat, and twenty pounds as beef. It will be good food strategy to reduce livestock numbers greatly, with the possible exception of milk cows, if there is to be a serious food shortage, and convert the grains into human food. The meat will take the place of cereal foods at the start, and leave more of them for direct consumption later.
But it must be borne in mind that the continent of Europe, in spite of its large livestock population, always has imported large amounts of beef, mutton, butter, cheese, and lard. Its deficiencies in these products have run from nearly a fifth for lard, and a sixth for butter and beef, to 4 per cent for pork.
The people of much of Europe are large eaters of potatoes. So well suited is the climate to this crop that great quantities are fed to livestock in Central Europe. Few potatoes are traded between countries. Each grows almost exactly what it consumes. The potato acreage commonly increases in wartime; but the unusual temperatures of last winter froze large quantities of seed in storage.
Imports of sugar have averaged 2,700,000 tons — about a fourth of the consumption. Sugar is not a vital part of the human diet; but its absence is keenly felt.
Vastly more important is the fats and oils situation. The pork of Europe is lean, fitted for market on barley mostly. The countries on the mainland have been supplementing their domestic and imported supplies of fat in pork and beef with butterfat in butter and cheese, with lard and whale and fish oils, and with imports of over three million tons of vegetable oils a year. The Norwegian whaling vessels took to port in North America when the Germans invaded the homeland. Only a small part of Manchuria’s soy-bean crop has been exported this year. The Danes have doubled their consumption of butter, substituting it for the margarine which they have imported till now. Their butter exports have fallen a half, and now go to the German-bloc states, including Sweden. The Netherlands is making the same sort of shift. If feed imports are not resumed, the production of butterfat will decline next winter. Germany has recently substituted butter for margarine in its food ration.
The situation described may be summarized by saying that if the continent of Europe must feed itself until the 1941 crop is harvested, assuming that the reserves now on hand are no larger than estimated in this country, it may possibly be able to endure by slaughtering livestock freely, reserving all its wheat and rye for bread uses, and diverting a million bushels of barley, oats, and corn to direct human use. But it will be a close squeeze, and there will be a large deficiency of fats and oils, with effects on health difficult to foresee. And it cannot be too strongly stressed that later information may make the situation look worse than is here indicated. At the best, the diets of many groups will need to be much changed — perhaps no more, however, than those of Germany were changed in anticipation of hostilities.
The foregoing statement also assumes a more equal distribution of the food resources between countries than has prevailed in the past — that any amounts of an essential food one country has in excess of the average will be made available to those in deficit. One has no right to expect in the present situation any such beneficent and efficient ordering of the affairs of Europe as this would require —certainly not with large armies still in the field and having first call on provisions. The four Baltic States included in this analysis have already been drawn within the Russian focus, and in more recent days some of the most productive parts of Rumania also. Russia herself had a bad winter and spring and may be as short of food as the rest of Europe. How wide the differences are by countries is indicated by the following percentages of food selfsufficiency recently compiled by the Berlin Institute of Business Relations: the Old Reich, 83; Austria, 75; former Czechoslovakia, 100; Poland, 105; Denmark, 103; Sweden, 91; the Netherlands, 67; Belgium, 51; Switzerland, 47; and Norway, 43. Some of these percentages arc too high by a considerable amount because no deductions have been made for imported feeds.
Again, there is an implication in what has been said that the available food will be so distributed between families that those in particular distress from losing their homes or crops or livestock, or their breadwinners, will be provided for equally with those that are not. Otherwise there will be a vast amount of starving and accompanying illness in the midst of subsistence at least for the rest. Nor have we any right to expect a perfect dispensation on this score, either.
A balanced view of the total situation is, therefore, that an effectively blockaded European continent will mean that a great number of people in some areas will suffer for want of food. Delay in restoring the necessary organization for procurement and distribution of food to stricken cities and areas may bring some of this suffering very soon. There may develop a great humanitarian need for assistance in feeding and caring for women and children. Mr. Hoover has suggested calling upon an outside power — ‘neutral,’I presume — to direct this.
What about after 1941? With time to replan and reorganize and rehabilitate, the continent of Europe, if it could operate approximately as one economic unit, could come much nearer to feeding itself than will be possible next year. It could shift its production more nearly to the potatoes, vegetables, and milk that Sir John Orr and David Lubbock advocate as an adequate diet for England in their recent book on Feeding the People in War-Time. Germany alone has not been able to achieve this because she has had too many people to feed per acre of her indifferent land; but with the better lands of Denmark, France, and the former states to the east brought into the same economic system, the self-sufficiency the Germans have been talking about would not be merely idle boasting. The food part of the standard of living, as we ordinarily define it, would unquestionably be lowered; but if enough cows could be kept and some fats could be imported, the diet would maintain health. The pinch would come in getting enough feed concentrates and vegetable oils. The latter might be obtained in the East.
The United Kingdom, feeding itself until the 1941 harvest, will need large importations of wheat and fats especially. Orr and Lubbock have figured out the calorics of food energy in thousands per cubic foot of shipping space for a list of foods beginning with butter at 143, fats and tallow at 118, sugar at 83, on down to bacon at 39, frozen beef at 26, and eggs in the shell at 12. When these rankings are balanced with prices, the best buys by a wide margin are sugar, fats, and wheat, with butter and dried fruits coming next. These British food specialists therefore urge that shipping space be reserved mainly for ‘wheat, fats, especially butter, sugar and/or cheese, and dried fruits, in the order named,’ and urge upon the Ministries of Food and Agriculture a program of subsidizing a large consumption and production of potatoes, vegetables, and milk. They condemn the present subsidy on meat production, and would encourage only so much of it as can be made incidental to the production of milk. Even though the Orr-Lubbock prescription is adopted, the United Kingdom will need to buy heavily abroad either in war or in peace. The fortunes of war in the next few weeks or months will suggest, if not determine, how far it needs to swing toward self-sufficiency. Whatever betides, it must have large amounts of food from somewhere this winter and indefinitely. Eire will need proportionately much less.
A further question that has disturbed many of late is whether the noncombatant countries are producing enough food to make up the deficiencies on the continent and in the British Isles. There need be no misgivings on this score. As for wheat, a year ago the world’s supply was the largest on record, and on July 1 of this year it will be only 100 to 200 million bushels less. Canada and Australia have 450 million surplus bushels on hand or in prospect, and Argentina has a promising crop coming. The United States would like to export 200 million bushels. Our current carry-overs include 288 million bushels of wheat, 675 million bushels of corn (as compared with 250 million normal), unusually large stocks of pork and lard, and about average stocks of nearly everything else. The problem of supplying Europe with food is not one of stocks and production — it concerns freedom to export and import, and ability to buy and to transport.
In making plans for next year’s production, the United States may well consider stepping up its wheat acreage a little just as a matter of insurance against who-knows-what in a war-crazy world. But there is nothing in the actual figures to indicate need of it. Dairy production would expand immediately if a larger demand were in prospect. Corn and hog production, what with widening use of the new high-yielding hybrid strains of corn, would surge forward in a great wave if someone would only buy.
Take off the brakes and let production mount where it will is a counsel sometimes heard these days. We may have to defend ourselves in a few years, they say, and will need all the reserves we can pile up. There is wisdom in keeping reserves ample, but beyond this any expansion of agricultural production would be a premature wasting of the soil resources which we have been building up in the last five years. Never has there been a time when we needed to plan and guide our production more carefully. More flexibility, to meet suddenly changing situations, would be desirable; but not more laxity.
The principal revision needed in our agricultural program is greater freedom to export. We must find some way of selling our surplus stocks of wheat, cotton, and other products at the going export prices. Otherwise, in the new barter economy that confronts us, we shall be helpless pawns.
Also, otherwise we shall not be in position to enter on equal terms with other New World countries into the export-sharing agreements now being discussed. Such agreements may specify export quotas only; but behind these must be either production quotas or devices for disposing of surpluses in domestic uses. In our country we shall need both. Fortunately we have already learned much about how to use both.
If hemisphere planning and direction of exports and production are to be effective, the United States will need to carry out its part firmly. It will need to say that it will confine its exports of wheat, cotton, corn, and butter to specified amounts, and keep strictly within these limits. If its leadership is to be accepted, it will need to be a little generous in its offers to restrict its offerings abroad, and more generous in its efforts to help some of its sister nations dispose of their surpluses. To get itself into a position to play such a rôle, it will need above all to reduce its current stocks to normal proportions. History may possibly be so enacted in the next few months that the continent of Europe and the British Isles both will become places where the United States can dispose of some of its surpluses to its own advantage and humanity’s. We can be certain even now that disposal of large amounts of them among our own low-income people will be good for all concerned.
So fast is the world changing these days that conceivably a few years hence this country will find itself sitting down in conference with its sister American states and with representatives from Europe and outlining a program of production in this hemisphere that will best supplement Europe’s. The barriers to be surmounted in our own country are as high as anywhere. The demand for protection of beef prices that the ministries of Great Britain chose to meet was a trifle compared with the special-interest pleadings that will be encountered here.