Freedom Bought and Sold for Food
Pearl Harbor, like an earthquake, shocked the American people to a realization that we
are living in a dangerous world-dangerous for our way of life and for our survival as a
people, and perilous for the hope of the ages in the government of the people, by the
people, and for the people. Why should the world be dangerous for such a philanthropic
country as ours? The world is made dangerous by the desperation of peoples suffering
from privations and fear of privations, brought on by restrictions of the exchange of the
good and necessary things of Mother Earth. Industrialization has wrought in the past
century far-reaching changes in civilization, such as will go on and on into our unknown
future.
Raw materials for modern industry are localized here and there over the globe. They are
not equally available to national groups of peoples who have learned to make and use
machines. Wants and needs of food and raw materials have been growing up unevenly and
bringing on stresses and strains in international relations that are seized upon by
ambitious peoples and leaders to control by force the sources of such food and raw
materials. Wars of aggression, long and well-planned take place so that such materials can
be obtained.
These conflicts are not settled for good by war. The problems are pushed aside for a
time only to come back in more terrifying proportions at some later time. Lasting
solutions will come in another way. We can depend on the reluctance of peoples to launch
themselves into war, for they go to war because they fear something worse than war, either
real or propagandized.
A just relation of peoples to the earth rests not on exploitation, but rather on
conservation--not on the dissipation of resources, but rather on restoration of the
productive powers of the land and on access to food and raw materials. If civilization is
to avoid a long decline, like the one that has blighted North Africa and the Near East for
13 centuries, society must be born again out of an economy of exploitation into an economy
of conservation.
We are now getting down to fundamentals in this relationship of a people to the land.
My experience with famines in China taught me that in the last reckoning all things are
purchased with food. This is a hard saying; but the recent world-wide war shows up the
terrific reach of this fateful and awful truth. Aggressor nations used the rationing of
food to subjugate rebellious peoples of occupied countries. For even you and I will sell
our liberty and more for food, when driven to this tragic choice. There is no substitute
for food.
Seeing what we will give up for food, let us look at what food will buy-for money is
merely a symbol, a convenience in the exchange of the goods and services that we need and
want. Food buys our division of labor that begets our civilization.
Not until tillers of soil grew, more food than they themselves required were their
fellows released to do other tasks than the growing of food--that is, to take part in a
division of labor that became more complex with the advance of civilization.
True, we have need of clothing, of shelter, and of other goods and services made
possible by a complex division of labor, founded on this food production, when suitable
raw materials are at hand. And of these the genius of the American people has given us
more than any other nation ever possessed. They comprise our American standard of living.
But these other good things matter little to hungry people as I have seen in the terrible
scourges of famine.
Food comes from the earth. The land with its waters gives us nourishment. The earth
rewards richly the knowing and diligent but punishes inexorably the ignorant and slothful.
This partnership of land and farmer is the rock foundation of our complex social
structure.
In 1938, in the interests of a permanent agriculture and of the conservation of our
land resources, the Department of Agriculture asked me to make a survey of land use in
olden countries for the benefit of our farmers and stockmen and other agriculturists in
this country. This survey took us through England, Holland, France, Italy, North Africa,
and the Near East. After 18 months it was interrupted by the outbreak of war when Germany
invaded Poland in September 1939. We were prevented from continuing the survey through
Turkey, the Balkan States, southern Germany, and Switzerland as was originally planned.
But in a year and a half in the olden lands we discovered many things of wide interest to
the people of America.
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