How to Cause a Famine

March 5, 1951

“This program,” said President Truman, in asking Congress to give the Indian Government 75,000,000 bushels of grain, “does not constitute a precedent for continuing to provide food to India on a grant basis or for providing similar aid for other countries.” But it does, of course, constitute precisely such a precedent. We cannot do less in future for India or any other country without being accused of less generosity or plain discrimination.

Famine and starvation should, of course, always be prevented or relieved when humanly possible. But we must also ask what caused it, whose duty it is to relieve it, and what steps are essential to prevent its recurrence.

It has gradually, precedent by precedent, become the assumption of most foreigners and most American Fair Dealers that when any real or imagined deficiency of anything whatever exists anywhere on earth, it must be made good primarily, if not solely, at the expense of the American taxpayer. Yet even the Indian Government did not ask us for more than a long-term loan to enable it to buy this grain. Given reasonable prudence, it could easily have repaid such a loan. Why did Mr. Truman recommend a gift?

The process will be this. “America” will give the grain. But the average Indian (nearly 85 percent of the Indian people are illiterate) will probably never know this. For the gift will be to the Nehru government, and the Nehru government will sell the grain to India’s hungry. Moreover, the Nehru government will be allowed to keep for statist schemes even the “counterpart funds” it gets for selling what we give.

Just as Mr. Truman ascribed the Yugoslavian food shortage solely to “the drought,” so he now ascribes the Indian famine solely to “natural disasters—earthquakes, floods, droughts, and plagues of locusts.” Yet the famine has at least been intensified, if not principally caused, by the economic policies of the Nehru government:

1—The Nehru government is a “planning” government, a socialist government. Like all such governments it has embarked on a grandiose “industrialization” program. This means that it has diverted land, labor, and capital from agricultural to industrial production. This has directly reduced India’s production of food. Mr. Truman apparently approves of this compulsory diversion. For he wants to compel American taxpayers to subsidize it. It is explicitly because he wishes the Nehru government to have the funds to continue this “long-range economic development program” that he thinks American and not Indian taxpayers should be asked to pay for the present Indian food deficiency.

2—Specifically, the Nehru government intensified India’s food shortage by its isolationist efforts to become independent of Pakistan (or anywhere else) for cotton and jute. It ordered a reduction in grain-growing acreage to increase cotton and jute acreage.

3—The Nehru government has not permitted free markets in agriculture. It has put price ceilings on grain. These have, as always, discouraged and reduced the production and sale of grain. The government has resorted to forced government procurement of grain from peasant growers. Our government is asking American taxpayers to suffer from these policies and is not suggesting any change in them. Therefore the food shortage is likely to recur.

4—The argument that India cannot pay $190,000,000 for grain because it has only “limited foreign exchange reserves” and an “unfavorable balance of payments” is economic nonsense. These conditions are the result of the Nehru government’s own exchange control measures. It has made dollars scarce in the same way as it has made foodstuffs scarce—by putting artificial price ceilings on them.

In this grain discussion the whole emphasis has been on distribution. But in the long run nothing can save India or the world from poverty and famine but greater production. And there is willful blindness to the fact that government “planning,” price-fixing, and socialism inevitably discourage, reduce, and disrupt production.