Food for Red China

The American newspaper reader who finds an account of famine conditions in Communist China, and then turns a page to read of this country’s serious surplus food problem, naturally feels that there is something all wrong about this. It just doesn’t seem right that warehouses here should bulge with unsalable food at heavy government expense, while across the Pacific 600 million fellow human beings are either miserably hungry or actually starving.

The first and readiest answer to that, of course, is that the continued existence of a regime in Peiping whose policies have reduced China’s vast population to such a state of misery is not right, either. The next objection is that if we were ready with all the food needed to ease the distress of the hungry millions, we have no means of getting it past those responsible for their distress to those who need it most.

RG

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Rodney Gilbert

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The American newspaper reader who finds an account of famine conditions in Communist China, and then turns a page to read of this country’s serious surplus food problem, naturally feels that there is something all wrong about this. It just doesn’t seem right that warehouses here should bulge with unsalable food at heavy government expense, while across the Pacific 600 million fellow human beings are either miserably hungry or actually starving.

The first and readiest answer to that, of course, is that the continued existence of a regime in Peiping whose policies have reduced China’s vast population to such a state of misery is not right, either. The next objection is that if we were ready with all the food needed to ease the distress of the hungry millions, we have no means of getting it past those responsible for their distress to those who need it most.