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The war did not end as soon as the Allied planners expected. Sowing time this year finds armies fighting over some of the most important food-producing areas. Hundreds of thousands of farmers have been uprooted, unable to get home. Thousands of those who remain have no seed or tools. According to Washington's calculations, Europe will be lucky if it produces 105 million tons of food in 1945.
That would be only 10% below 1944, and Europe as a whole normally has to import only about 10% of the food it eats. Without any imports, Europe would have 80% of its normal supply. On the face of it, this was not catastrophe or even crisis. But, unhappily for the U.S. and the world, this was not the whole story. The danger lay a good deal deeper. Europe in 1945 was not likely to be "a whole."
In good times, the countries east of Germany produce more food than they eat. Germany and the countries west of it produce less than they eat (France, 83%; The Netherlands, 67%; Belgium, 51%; Norway, 43%). Damaged transport would hinder westward movement of food across Europe. Eastern food-surplus countries lie in the Russian sphere of military occupation or political influence. Millions of hungry Russians, on short rations since the summer of 1941, are likely to get any surplus from the Danube Basin and nearby areas.
Thus the European food shortage will be largely concentrated in Western Europe, and even there it cannot be spread evenly over the whole population. When food is short, only the strongest governments can make rural areas disgorge food for the cities. Inflation makes the task almost impossible. Strong governments and stable money are not good 1945 bets in Western Europe. Lack of adequate transport between farm and town has already driven food standards of European city-dwellers far below rural levels. In almost every liberated area, black markets abound, further concentrating the full effect of shortages on the poorer city-dwellers who cannot afford to buy what food there is.
In London and Washington, all this added up to potential revolution. That was why Britain's Minister of Production, the Rt. Hon. Oliver Lyttelton, and Food Minister Colonel John Jestyn Llewellin hurried to Washington. Lyttelton and Llewellin did not come to oppose last week's whacking cut in U.S. Lend-Lease meat to Britain. Britons were grumbling, but the British Cabinet, as sensitive to high international policy as to domestic politics, was more alarmed about what might happen across the Channel.
That, too, was why U.S. officials in France sent urgent warnings; why Churchill in Commons denied hotly that Britain was hoarding food at the expense of liberated Europe; why Judge Samuel Rosenman, speaking for the President, swung through the liberated capitals trying to persuade them that even Germany would have to be fed to prevent chaos and release U.S. soldiers for home or the Pacific. And that was why the decision on U.S. food exports was too big for Assistant President James F. Byrnes. The question could be settled only by the President—or Congress.