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Show 'Food Will Win the War' And Maybe an Election Washington Politicians Awaken to Fact That Voting Public, Like an Army, 'Moves on Its Stomach.' By BAUKHAGE A'eifJ Analyst and Commentator. r i j ... . 'j i WNU Service, Union Trust Building Washington, D. C. Wars and rumors of war, war production, pro-duction, man power, post-war plans, race riots, roll-backs, gas rationing, strikes, floods, olTcnsives you can think of a lot more probably. All right, pour them all into the hopper. Grind them up. This is a pretty dish to set before a voter in 1944! Don't worry, he can take it. But take away his bread-basket, and he is a different animal. Food will win the war. Lack of it can postpone victory if it doesn't spell defeat. And food, or lack of it, can lose an election, that is what you are hearing in Washington these days. An electorate, like an army, moves on its stomach. On an empty stomach, it moves away from the "ins," hollers for the "outs" to bring back the bacon. And when you get a customer with both an empty stomach and a full pocket-book pocket-book hammering on the table and demanding service, you have a hard customer to please. Slowly, the Washington politicians are beginning to awaken to that fact that food is going to be the big issue in the next election. President Saw It First The President and his keen-eyed, ears-to-the-ground political scouts recognized it first, and when Phil Murray, head of the CIO, and William Wil-liam Green of the AFL began to call for the roll-back of prices, the administration was quick to promise prom-ise that they would be served "right away." Meanwhile, some of the other oth-er guests are beginning to feel neglected. neg-lected. But before roll-backs au gratin could be served, congress stuck its foot out and tried to spill the tray. Fora while, it looked as if there was going to be embarrassment in the political kitchen. Even if the administration is able to silence the demands and threats of labor, there are a lot of other Oliver Twists who "want some more" and who will twist out of their straight-ticket voting and start looking for "a better 'ole" unless this food question is solved before the ides of November MCMXLIV. Through the days when congress was first trying to fold its tent and steal away from the banks of the Potomac, one thing was clear: unless un-less the administration pulled a nice, fat and succulent rabbit out of the hat which could be served up to the electorate with enough bas-ketsfull bas-ketsfull left over for the fighting forces and the hungry Allies and other pospective clients, the Gallup poll vaulters which had re-re-re-elected the New Deal in advance would have to start their polling all over again. The enemies of the administration are building up a barrage to the effect ef-fect that Mr. Roosevelt has babied labor and has left his old friends, the farmers, in the lurch. They say that because he was afraid to offend of-fend labor, he listened to their demands de-mands for lower prices and turned a deaf ear to the farmers' troubles. This, of course, since it comes from hardly non-partisan quarters, has to be taken with a grain of salt, but whatever the working man says, when he sees the cost of living eating eat-ing up his former "raises" if he has had them, the record will show that despite John Lewis' polysyllabic attacks at-tacks on the President, labor has not been treated exactly as a stepchild. step-child. But what has the farmer been getting meanwhile? A couple of assists, at least, which have benefited him and the war effort ef-fort at the same time. FCA Head Reports Let me report to you what I learned from Governor Black of the Farm Credit administration, an institution in-stitution which has managed to escape es-cape the attacks which most of the government agencies have had to weather. Governor Black was in Washington the other day the headquarters head-quarters of the Farm Credit administration admin-istration were moved to Kansas City a year ago, you know, in the interest inter-est of decentralization and with the idea that after all, Kansas is nearer the center of American agriculture than the Atlantic seaboard. The governor tells me that the FCA has been used heavily since the first of the year to see that farmers farm-ers are getting the credit they need to achieve all-out production. He admits ad-mits that the 50 million dollars loaned to farmers and stockmen isn't much compared with the total amount of production financing which the farmers use in a year but it's something even (n these days of astronomical lending, leasing and spending. The loans are made through the Regional Agricultural Credit corporation. corpo-ration. Here are just a few of the facts Black produced from his briefcase. Take flax flax is as important in its way as tanks are in theirs. The automobile manufacturers have had it made worth their while to manufacture manu-facture tanks instead of autos. The farmers up in take North Dakota, for instance have "shared the risk" as Black puts it, with the RACC (Regional Agricultural Credit corporation) corpo-ration) which extended them credit to "change over" to flax. Instead of one million three hundred thousand acres of this valuable crop that was harvested last year, a million EIGHT hundred and forty thousand acres were seeded this year (41.4 per cent government financed). Take dry beans in Montana: 50,-000 50,-000 acres seeded this year, double last year's planting, 84.5 per cent of the crop government financed. I could go down the list with peanuts in South Carolina, sweet potatoes in Louisiana and Mississippi, ad infinitum. infini-tum. Simple Machinery The way this share-the-risk thing works is simple. The farmer puts up his land and labor, the RACC puts up the out-of-pocket costs after the county war board and its own representatives have approved the deal. If the crop comes out all right, the farmer pays the loan. If it is wiped out by bugs, drouth or disaster dis-aster (and when 01' Man River went hog-wild this spring, there was a lot of wiping out) his liability isn't wiped out, too, because his liability is limited to what he took .in from the crop and the incentive payments or insurance on it. "It wasn't so much a matter of how much money was loaned," Governor Gov-ernor Black said to me, "as where it was loaned and what it was loaned for. In the past few months, the country has awakened to the necessity neces-sity of producing the vital crops to the limit, and that's where we concentrated con-centrated our financing." Well, that is one agency that has been able to go ahead without having hav-ing to duck the political brickbats. Other government agencies, not so lucky, had to take a lot of punishment punish-ment that wouldn't have been directed di-rected at them if it weren't for politics. poli-tics. The poor Commodity Credit corporation, which everybody seems to love for itself alone, got into an unpleasant jam with the subsidies, and had a tight squeeze partly through pure politics, partly because congress and the President didn't see eye-to-eye on the anti-inflation program. What most people fail to realize is this: even now with all the splendid effort the farmers have made, agriculture agri-culture has not yet been entirely "converted" I don't mean converted convert-ed to the "all-out" idea but converted convert-ed in the sense that civilian industry was converted to war production autos to tanks and planes, sewing machines to machine guns. Industry In-dustry had plenty of "incentive." The farmers have had some help, will have more. And the consumer (who is really everybody) and the farmer and the worker, haven't gotten it through their heads yet that unless they all hang together, they'll hang separately. sepa-rately. If we don't get the food, we won't be able to eat the dollars, no matter mat-ter how many we may have in our sock. . The per capita use of eggs in 1942 was 316. Prospects for this year are about 324 per capita. The army and lend-lease need about 3 eggs out of every 10 produced, which leaves 7 out of every 10 for civilians. |