WINNING THE PEACE

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 9, 6 October 1943, Page 4

WINNING THE PEACE

Basic Social And Economic

Problems IMMEDIATE POST-WAR RELIEF

“It is already clear as we see tlie beginning of the end of this war looming nearer that this time the Allied Nations have a clearer conception than at tlie end of tlie last war that winning tlie peace is an integral part of winning the war,” said Mr. J. O. Shearer, lecturer it; economics at Victoria University College, in an address before tlie Wellington branch of the League of Nations Union yesterday. Some Observers, lie continued, saw in projects already in hand an attempt tliis time to build tlie peace from tlie bottom upward by providing for solutions for some of the basic social and economic problems before fully determining the political treatment to be accorded to the conquered nations. An initial and most important stop had already been taken at the conference held at Hot Springs, U.S.A., in May and June of this year, on which tlie report of the New Zealand delegates had now been published. Already a spate of conferences were in train, for discussion of further questions, some of which might present more knotty problems and greater possibilities of disagreement between the major powers. They would include a conference to carry further the work done at Hot Springs, specially in the field of immediate post-war relief, including’ the setting up of an Allied food organization, on which broad agreement had already been reached by the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and China. Conferences would also be held to deal with international measures in respect of currency and the freeing of international trade; to lay the foundation for stimulating international investment and for controlling and directing its movement and safeguarding its results; to lay the foundations for international action to facilitate and correlate economic expansion in all parts of the world; to work out a practical and realistic system of securing collective security. There were some dangers to be provided against in this programme, Mr. Shearer proceeded. The findings of official delegates were likely to be enshrined in public papers, which wore often fated to be read by few. Any agreements reached would have to be implemented by legislatures whose members had not shared in the dis missions. Public interest and discussion should not lag too far behind conference discussions, and should be alive to the need for compromise to secure international agreement and co-opera-tion. In this field the Press could help greatly. Feeding the starving nations of the world after the war would be a gigantic task. Apart from foodstuffs, shipping and rolling stock would have to be provided, and staffs’trained to see that the food reached the .people for whom it was intended. The food problem In European countries and in Persia, India and China was serious, and’ the wheat-producing areas of Russia had been devastated.

To this would have to be added in many count ries precautions to limit the spread of serious epidemics of diseases due entirely or indirectly to malnutrition, as well as typhus, malignant malaria, smallpox, plague and cholera. The problem of medical relief must, therefore, loom large, specially in view of the relative breakdown of health services in some European' countries, and the need for fuller development of them in some European and Asiatic countries.

“There is the motive that the rapid and adequate distribution of relief gives influence and iwer in moulding and directing the recovery, political and economic, of nations that have been devastated by war,” continued the speaker. “After all, we have seen the tragic political results of a generation of Germans who were infants in a period of post-war malnutrition, and reached maturity in a period of world depression. Moreover, we have seen, and it is to be hoped 'benefited from, the inadequacies of relief after the last war, great and praiseworthy as were the efforts then made.”