agencies of the United Nations must in conscience be matched with steps to control arms and develop the peacekeeping machinery of the United Nations Organization itself. For if a workable pattern of peace must be constructed patiently by building first its component parts, the parts in the end must fit a pattern that makes enough sense to keep us not only healthy but also alive.

Toward a World Free From Hunger

All this was foreseen by the wise men at Hot Springs 20 years ago when they provided that the international food organization aborning there should become a part of the yet-unborn United Nations family of agencies. And it was foreseen explicitly by the founders of the United Nations when they wrote in the preamble to the charter that "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" we must "promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom." Enough food for all, available in fact to all, is the first elemental breadcrumb of a future in larger freedom.

Indeed, the role of the FAO as part of a pattern for peace, including the political agencies, was forecast by the story that Judge Jones told when he came back to his former colleagues of the House Committee on Agriculture to report on the Hot Springs Conference—and it applies just as well to rivalries among the international agencies as it does to quarrels among the

nations:

In one of McGuffey's Readers [said Judge Jones] was the story of a man with six sons who were always quarreling. One day he called them together, showed them a bundle of sticks bound together and offered a prize to any one of them who would break the bundle. They all tried and reported that it could not be done. "That is easy," said the old man, who then unbound the sticks and broke them one by one.

"Anyone could do it that way," the boys replied. "So it is with you, my sons," declared the father. "If you stick together no one can hurt you, but if you continually quarrel and fight among yourselves you can be broken separately."

In a fundamental sense, then, the FAO is more than a food and agriculture organization: It is part of a pattern for peace which is far from completed. Yet we know that when we improve the political machinery for keeping the peace we strengthen the functional agencies—and when we improve the functional agencies we strengthen the prospects for peace. And that brings us back to the business at hand: the FAO's goal of a world free from hunger.

Can we do it? Can we feed 6 billion people by the year 2000? Can we double total farm production and triple the output of milk, meat, eggs, and fish? On the record-the record of miraculous technology-we surely can.

If Ceylonese motorboats can multiply by 10 the fish brought in by boats propelled by oar; if a general use of hybrid corn would double the world's supply of corn; if a dairy cow in one part of Asia can produce 25 times the milk of her counterpart in other parts of Asia; if the Japanese can produce more rice per square inch than anybody else; if only 1 acre of land is now cultivated for each person in the world and another 22 acres is probably tillable; if the world's most densely populated nation can earn foreign exchange as a net exporter of food; if in this country 1 farmer can feed his own family and 26 others then surely our work is cut out for us, surely there is still plenty of room for the human race on this compacted globe, and surely the vision of a world free from hunger is a realistic goal and not a pipedream.

After 20 years of working at it, the members and staff of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.N. system have only just begun

on what Lester Pearson, in his report of the first FAO Conference, called "so bold an aim as that of helping nations to achieve freedom from want." Watching the World Food Congress over the next 2 weeks some observers may say, as one historian of the U.N. Charter said of Hot Springs: "Its immediate results consist largely of fairly obvious generalizations and recommendations."

Obvious? Yes, it long has been an obvious generalization that too many people are hungry. But 20 years ago it was not so obvious to many that much could be done about it. Now it is. And I predict that it soon will be just as obvious that we who have inherited the vision and the work begun at Hot Springs are going to do more and more about it-and with such will that another generation will know a world for the first time free from hunger.

GPO 1963 O 652220 (162)