CHRISTMAS IN A WORLD OF HUNGER

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5286, 24 December 1946, Page 2

CHRISTMAS IN A WORLD OF HUNGER

demoralised nations greatly in [ '* , need of help

I • "Nothirig ever becomes real," John Keats wrote in a ' letter a year before his death, "till it is experienced." Even [ I *• a proverb isn't true, till you've discovered its truth for yourI self, said Mr. James Bertram, M.A., a former New Zealand I Rhodes Scholar, who.has had extensive experience of the Far I East, in a broadcast on Sundfiy on Christmas in a Hungry |! World.

War is like that; and that is one j reason why all the millions of words I that have been written about this I highwater mark of human folly have I mostly been wasted. Tolstoy can tell I you something about war in eight j volumes, and Wilfred Owen can tell you more in 30 lines. But old peoplte I forget; and young people keep growI ing up who don't know the thing j itself. If they did, there wouldn't j be any more wars. It's the same j with hunger. ^ I Most New Zealanders know what I it means to have a healthy outdoor J hunger. Real hunger is different. J It means that there isn't any good Iffood waiting at home. It means going I on being hungry for weeks and months and years oh ehd — trying to I live that way,. and Wosk that wav, I and not go crazy at seeing what it's I doing to your friends and your own family. Yet that's how millions of people in the war-ravaged countries I of Europe and Asia are living toI day. I'm no expert on hunger, though j I've seen a bit of it in Southern J Europe and the Far East. And, in I common with a good many other J ex-P.O.W.'s, I'Ve had some experiI ence of it myself. "Malnutrition" I and "under-nourisRment" are nice technical-sounding words; we've all I seen pictures of some of the symptoms. But it's different when 5t happens to you. 1 Myself, for instance. I'm nearly I six feet in height, and I weight about 12 § stone as I sit before this microI phone. Two years ago in Tokio I j weighed just over 7 stone. I wasn't j lying in a hospital cot. I was out j working on the Tokio docks and we J didn't work a 40-hour week. Don't think this is just prisonI camp stuff; have a look at some I UNRRA pictures from China. That's how it is for Hunan and Chekiang peasants to-day, who are living on I grass and dragging their own ploughs f through the paddy-fields because I they've lost their water-buffaloes. I And if it isn't quite as bad for the I peoples of Greece and Poland, of j Austria and Germany, it's still bad enough. Bitterness of -Butter Rationing Soon after I returned to New ZeaI land last year, I heard a story from a I friend of mine who'd just come back I from overseas. He'd been through I Orete and the desert, and the Italian j campaign; and he went to see his uncle, who stood him a dinner. All I through dinner his uncle talked j about the New Zealand Government, I but he didn't ask any questions about { the war. Tben, after coffee, he I shodk his head sadly at his nephew I and said: "You know, it musf be tough for you, son, coming back to j our butter rationing in New ZeaI land !" I Real hunger means demoralisation. 1 Morale cracks much more easily I under hunger than it does under I feombs. J I've seen a civilised European, for I instance, marching with a group of other prisoners, suddenly break ranks and plunge into the stinking water of a Tokio" canal to fish out a raw turnip, floating among swollen oorpses. He didn't e(ven stop to scrape the turnip before he started gnawing it. I've watehed a Cambridge scholar, who used to dine at I High Table in Trinity, retrieving I scraps of bu^nt rice from a flyblown ash-pile. He wasn't very happy about it, but he ate the burnt rice. These things don't just happen with ignorant Balkan peasants or Chinese coolies. The world can't alford to leave people anywhere, either in the countries of our Allies, or of our late enemies, in that state. It isn't Christian. It isn't human. And it isn't safe. For epidemics are no respecters of frontiers. Your children aren't safe — no spot on earth is safe — so long as these conditions linger on. This nost-war world, after we'd

done our best to knoik it silly with bombs and mines and the most brilliant of all twentieth-century inventions, needed intern'ational relief and rehabilitation big enough to cope with ravaged continents. That was how UNRRA was born. It didn't do badly, either, till people started calling it a "hand-out." "Hand-out" is one of the words, I think, we might conveniently forget. When I went back to Tokio early this year on an offfcial mission, our ship docked beside the same wharves where our old Omori gang used to work as prisoners. A Yankee.transport was pulling out, loaded with homebound iGI's. The GI's were having a lot of fun throwing cigarettes and cawdy down on to the quay, and watching the Japanese dockers fight for it. Borderline of Human Dignity It didn't seem so funny to me. Because, not so long before, I'd watehed those same Japanese throwing sweets or biscuits to a crowd of Allied prisoners. And I'd seen not ragged, comical Japanesef but ragged Europeans, some of them still wearing the tattered badges and battl'e-honours of • 1' amous regiments, down on their knees like Arab street-urchins, scrambling and flghting -among themselves f or- the spoils. That'§ what hunger does to you. It's- starvation, (not race or geography, that -draws most accurately the borderline .of self-respect and human Aignity, You mightYemember that, if you're ever. tempted -to throw pennies from 'the deck of a toqrist liner. UNRRA was never a hand-out.' It was an investment for the future of one world, an international agreement- that "brought substantial benefits to the givers as well as to the re-

i i j ceivei's of bulk relief supplies. And i in the countries that war hit hardest | recovery has been slow and painful^ ; even with the full help of UNRRA. ! This year, as a kind of Christmas present from Washirigton, London and Ottawa, the hungry peoples of ' Europe have the knowledge that ' there won't be any more UNRRA. : They have been told, in the less than diplomatic words of an Assistant Secretary of State, "We cannot take i these nations by the hand forever. j So far as UNRRA is concerned, the gravy train is going around for the j last time." . i I don't like this language and I don't like this view of international relief. UNRRA, the noble qonception of a great American President, may have deserved a few of the kicks it has come in for over the ,last three years. But will anybody question its value as an example of international co-operation on a completely unprecedented scale? Will anybody deny that it was necessary? Will anybody deny that its job is only half-done? "Direct Aid to Friends" The right time for UNRRA to finish would have been when there were no more really hungry people in Europe and in Asia. And that time hasn't come yet. The plain fact is that hungfer and security just don't go together. If security is to be the chief responsibility of the United Nations, then the first thing the United Nations have to do is see to it that all people everywhere have got enough ';o eat. UNRRA was the first big step in that direction'; and UNRRA has 'oedn, the first major international ?asualty of the peace. Something, we are told, will be t'ound to take the place of UNRRA; some international controls will still N,emain. And meantlme the voluntary organisations, of which CORSO, in New Zealand, is the corporate reoresentative, will carry on with their own limited programme for relief of suffering countries overseas. — But the major problem of a hungry world remains unsolved. It is an abiding challenge to the United Nations as a whole, and above all to those member nations, like our own, that • have a surplus of food in these postvvar years. UNRRA, with all its faults of adninistration, was a notable pioneer of international co-operation; and it was able to do a job because it had Ihe funds to do it with. Anysuccessor to UNRRA, it seems, will have io make shift witbout comparable i'unds. And the wealthy nations of ihe world — those that are having a hard time on their butter-rationing — .vill substitute "direct aid to their friends" for the abandoned principle if "international aid for all." This ' : not progress; it is retreat.