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Perkins holds the whip over prices, through the power of his surplus-buying. Any time he quits buying, he can wreck the market. This power kills food specula tion. Outside of cotton, wheat and tobacco, they consider that there is no surplus problem except storage space—because they can always dump extra purchases into the daily free school lunches of 9,000,000 undernourished U.S. children, or into the tremendous maw of the food-stamp pro gram, feeding reliefworkers.
They are unanimous in their aim: feed Britain, starve Europe. Starving Europe is a matter of diplomacy, and thus is the province of the State Department, but Wickard sees eye-to-eye with Secretary of State Cordell Hull: occasional token ship ments of food to occupied countries, doled out solely for diplomatic effect.
They all see eye-to-eye on a bigger problem, too—the International Triple-A. Last week the first International Wheat Conference, pointing to that goal, was held in Washington. To spokesmen of the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Great Britain, Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles made two points: 1) in another year wheat surpluses totaling 1½ billions of bushels will hang over the international markets; 2) mere discussion will not suffice. The members agreed, and knuckled down to work.
In the U.S. the international effects will show: 1) through the Government price-pegging of all major crops under the parity bills, and through Commodity Credit Corporation; 2) through Government accumulation of surpluses; 3) through Government encouragement, or even compulsion, of a changeover from the "basic crops" of the past to the new basic crops; 4) through a rising cost to the nation, annually totaling at least $2,000,000,000, of this farm program; 5) the establishment of this program as permanent, not temporary.
The Government will take the risks. Controls will spread into industry through controls on dealers, then on processors (as in the marketing agreements), on into distrlbution. The goal is more production, more consumption, a higher national—and eventually international—standard of living.
The flaw in this plan last week: German starvation was a long, long way off. In some ways British starvation was likelier, until the Battle of the Atlantic went the other way.
Therefore the transition in the U.S. farm economy must be as rapid as posslble, must accompany step by step the enormous transition that the defense program is gradually forcing into the U.S. industrial economy. The shape of the nation now must change unrecognizably. Claude Wickard, thinking of the present U.S. scale of living, and looking overseas at the hunger of the world, thought this change would be for the better.
Hog Farm to Cabinet. The change would be, to a large extent, in his hands. They are large hands, strong, thick, sure. He is a man of few nerves; doubts seldom gnaw his mind. Even the pressing fog of worry that hangs over Washington rolls back before his full smile. He is solid, his feet on earth, and his roots go deep into the middle of the U.S.