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Feast or Famine. Now Canada's problem is finding buyers. Even the Russians, saddled with their own surplus, seem disinclined to accept the final 150 million bushels of wheat that they had ordered in 1966 as part of one of the largest grain sales ever concluded. Last month, the five major wheat producers met in Washington to shore up the sagging price floors, but the meeting adjourned without agreement.
Farming has been a feast-or-famine business for almost as long as history has recorded harvests. Today's bins of surplus food serve as pointed reminders that most agricultural policies are inadequate, inconsistent and archaic. The cost of subsidized farming in the Common Market is more than $2 billion a year; in the U.S. it is $3.6 billion. Yet prices are erratic, and people go hungry. Agricultural technology has shown that the Malthusian apocalypse of starvation can be avoided. The immense task now for the producers is to devise the economic and political conveyor belts that could put surplus food in the mouths of those who need it.