The recent meeting of the United Nations Scientific Conference on Conservation and Utilization of Resources underlined a new fact in human history that may ultimately be of far greater importance than all the deliberations of the UN’s more publicized organs: the perfecting of what is in essence a technological weapon as constructive in its potential as the atom bomb is destructive. Will we have the vision to put a power to work that, in the opinion of the author of this report, can win the cold war and bring peace to mankind? James Rorty reports on the UNSCCUR meeting and its revolutionary implications.

_____________

The fact and the fear of hunger have ruled the world as long as human creatures have walked it. Hunger governed the primitive world of the Psalmist, where the sower went forth weeping to the field—weeping because he had snatched the precious seed grain from the mouths of his hungry family. It gnawed at the core of the Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages, England recorded seven major famines; there were seven in France during the 1700’s, climaxed by the crop failure that precipitated the Revolution. In China and India throughout history, starvation and pestilence have been endemic.

For ten thousand years—until toward the end of the 18th century—the art of agriculture remained almost static. Then the technological revolution in agriculture began. Yet even during the 19th century Europe experienced three great food crises. Each time the rapidly expanding industrial population of Europe was rescued by the improvement and mechanization of agriculture and by the opening of new grainlands in North America, Argentina, and Australia. Today there are no new grainlands, every year there are twenty million new mouths to feed, and only about a third of the earth’s peoples even now get enough to eat. Seneca wrote that a hungry people will not endure reason, will not listen to justice, and will not bend to any prayer for mercy. If hunger is not at the surface of the present war fear, it is in the minds of most of mankind a ruling assumption just beneath it. The policy of nations still proceeds on the assumption that there is not and can never be enough food to go around, and that hunger is the penalty of weakness and defeat, the inevitable lot of the hindmost.

_____________

Against this background Trygve Lie, Secretary General of the United Nations, convened the United Nations Scientific Conference on Conservation and Utilization of Resources (UNSCCUR) last August at Lake Success. More than five hundred scientists and technologists from forty-four countries answered the call of the UN Economic and Social Council, whose consultants had spent three years preparing the conference. Modest men, they nevertheless carried in their heads and briefcases some of the most critical knowledge and skills of technological civilization.

They had gathered to consider the questions: Must want and war still rule the world, now that the barriers of space and time were down and it was helplessly or hopefully one world? Could the feeding of that world win the race with its breeding?

One might have thought that the world would hang breathless on their answers. But that week a crazed war veteran shot a dozen people and took all the headlines. The press section, even on the opening day, was almost empty, so that what the scientists and engineers said in answer to those life-and-death questions barely got beyond the walls of the conference chamber.

To this writer, that was the strangest aspect of the whole event.

For the answers of the assembled experts were in general agreement and completely sensational.

In effect, the scientists proclaimed a revolution, stupendous in its implications, in the relation of man to his environment. They said that hunger is obsolete in the modern world. They said that the land and the sea hold resources adequate, if they are fully utilized, to feed the present population of the world and any probable increases. They said that we are much more likely to survive by a worldwide organization of plenty than by any attempt to retreat into autarchic, self-sufficient compartments.

The delegates became eloquent in their efforts to impress on the world the revolutionary implications of what they had to report. Dr. Robert Saulter, Chief of the Bureau of Plant Industry, Soils, and Agricultural Engineering of the United States Department of Agriculture, concluded his address by exclaiming: “For the first time in the history of the world, man has within his grasp the tools with which to wipe starvation from the earth. Modern man faces the greatest challenge of all times!”

Sir Herbert Broadley, Deputy General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, was equally explicit: “We believe,” said Sir Herbert, “that the books of food supplies and food needs can be balanced by increasing the supply assets, not by reducing the needs liabilities. . . . We are not assembled here with our backs to the wall determined to make a last grim bloody stand in a hopeless cause. We are preparing for a new day, a new D-day, confident in the assurance that victory is possible—nay, sure—if we have the courage, plan intelligently, and use all the resources of the world aright.”

Other speakers, such as Colin Clark, Director of the Bureau of Industry and Undersecretary of State of Australia, expressed a more guarded optimism. World population, Dr. Clark said, is increasing at the rate of one per cent a year. But there is good evidence, he added, that the real quantity of farm products could be increased at the rate of one and one half per cent a year. “On the face of it,” he concluded, “we have the problem beaten.”

_____________

How dependable are these promises? Admittedly they are difficult to appraise, because they are conditioned by so many unknown and variable technical factors and qualified by so many political reservations.

If only because of the abstention of the Soviet bloc, no inventory of either exhaustible or renewable resources was possible at UNSCCUR. Largely for the same reason, it was necessary to hold the conference in a political vacuum. The delegates represented only themselves. They had personal freedom but no authority to commit their governments to any concerted program for the conservation and utilization of resources. Moreover, there were flagrant and acknowledged gaps in the agenda of the conference. For obvious political reasons, the section on fuels and energy omitted any discussion of atomic power, destined almost certainly to be a major energy source within a decade or two. There was no section on demography, although inevitably the population problem kept cropping up in both the plenary meetings and the section papers.

What one missed most of all, however, was any serious attempt—beyond a few hasty improvisations at the concluding plenary sessions—to synthesize the various production potentials that were described and discussed at the section meetings.

Our modern science and technology is an indivisible cultural whole. Its true potential for the conquest of hunger and want is some multiple of the separate potentials described by the various UNSCCUR specialists in agriculture, forestry, metals, fuels, minerals. To realize these separate potentials and their probably breath-taking multiple, it is necessary to identify and remove the obstacles—which may be technical, social, or political—in an extraordinarily complex and dynamic process. A few examples will serve to illustrate the point.

_____________

In Iran the principal obstacles are a shortage of water, the malaria mosquito, and the feudalism of Iranian society. Airplane spraying of DDT will control malaria at a cost of fifteen to thirty cents per person per year, thereby releasing new resources of manpower to execute Iran’s seven-year plan of power dam construction, irrigation, agricultural, and industrial modernization. The feudal bureaucrat is more resistant. If Western capital is used chiefly to bolster Iran’s outmoded state apparatus, then the plan will lag and sooner or later the Iranian peasants will welcome the liberation—with subsequent enslavement—offered by Iran’s Northern Big Brother.

India, too, hangs in the balance between East and West. There one of the most critical bottlenecks will be broken if the Indian farmers are provided with cheap fertilizers. “Unless we can do this,” said Dr. J. N. Ray, deputy director-general of industries and supply for the government of India, “we will be unable to provide the necessary twenty-six hundred calories per day. India has now fallen short of food, and nearly forty-eight million of her ‘average men’ are not adequately provided with food. Unless we get full international cooperation, the future is rather dark.” It is very dark in India both nutritionally and politically. Two nitrate plants like those Du Pont built in Delaware during the war would probably swing the balance to the West. If India had had those plants in 1945, the famine of that year might well have been prevented, in the opinion of some of the best-informed UNSCCUR delegates.

Cheaper fertilizer is the key to both food and freedom in other countries as well: Chile, whose farmers are now paying for a unit of fertilizer three or four times what they can get for their wheat, with the result that crop yields and soil fertility are dropping and political tensions rising; Japan, whose intensive soil-conserving agriculture is now largely dependent on phosphate mined in Idaho and paid for with American dollars; New Zealand and Australia, whose dairy and wheat farmers may reach the end of their Pacific Island supplies of phosphate in a few years.

Before the war, international cartels rationed the production and controlled the price of the three principal plant nutrients—nitrogen, phosphate, and potash. Hugely expanded production of all three and their distribution under Food and Agricultural Organization auspices to break food bottlenecks around the world is one of the most critical requirements of the present world food situation. Only when this and other basic jobs of rationalization are done on a worldwide scale will the optimism expressed by Sir Herbert Broadley and Dr. Robert Saulter begin to take on reality, as both are quite aware.

Essentially, this aspect of the world food problem arises from the fact that the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old agricultural revolution which continues to make enormous strides in America has barely reached China and India. During the past twenty years, the average per-acre yields of all major crops in this country have increased about fifty per cent, largely owing to the introduction of hardier and more prolific varieties of plants. For example, introduction of the better type of seed now used in this country would alone enable India to increase her annual rice crop by a million tons.

New insecticides, plant growth regulators, weed eradicators, and the precision placement of fertilizers guided by research with radioactive isotopes, have all contributed tremendous gains to American agriculture. Many of these gains can be transmitted without too much delay to the less advanced countries. The same methods that today are enabling our Southeastern farmers to increase their com yield from thirty to one hundred bushels per acre can be counted on eventually to produce a similar result in other hot and humid areas: for example, Italy, where American hybrid com has been dramatically successful.

“The technological difficulties are great,” said Dr. Saulter, “yet these are probably small in contrast to the complex social, economic, and political questions largely outside the field of agriculture.”

_____________

In Estimating potential increases in world food production, FAO and other experts usually take account only of the basic agricultural staples. Yet it is habit more than anything else that makes us look to the land for our food harvests. Actually, our oceans, lakes, and freshwater ponds represent a huge food potential that we have barely begun to exploit.

Over seventy per cent of the surface of the earth is covered with water. The sea, which is the ultimate legatee of land erosion, contains all the minerals required for life and compares favorably with good garden soil in fertility. “Acre for acre,” writes Dr. F. N. Woodward, director of the Scottish Seaweed Association, “[the sea] is more productive than the land, and there is no danger of drought or violent temperature fluctuations and relatively little fear of disease.”

To produce a calorie of animal protein on land requires the prior production of seven calories of animal feed. Yet we can get that calorie directly from the ocean at half the cost of producing pork—the pig being our most efficient land animal converting carbohydrates into proteins.

Some of UNSCCUR’s fisheries experts estimated that the present twenty-million-ton yield of marine fisheries could be increased as much as one hundred per cent—quite possibly in time to help achieve FAO’s 1960 target, which requires a forty-six per cent increase of total protein production. True, the marine fisheries of the Northern Hemisphere are showing signs of exhaustion, but the propagation and transplanting of marine fish have proved practicable, and the almost untouched fisheries resources of the Southern Hemisphere await only systematic development under international control.

An equal or greater potential is offered by the extension of fresh-water fish-farming, practiced at its best in China, which has a half million acres of fish ponds. Pond fisheries can be made to yield all the way from one hundred and thirty to four thousand pounds a year per acre. The most valuable fisheries on record are not in the ocean but in the Delta Lakes of Egypt, which produce over twenty thousand metric tons of fish annually. Indian fish ponds yield far more food, acre per acre, than Indian soil. Eliminate the water hyacinth, which is not at all impossible, and the fish ponds of Bengal could add one hundred million pounds per year to their present fish production. China’s rice paddies produce one hundred and thirty pounds of fish per acre—ten times that with feeding—and the fish help by eating the rice borer. Fish farming and malaria control can also be teamed, since fish eat the malaria mosquito. They are also efficient converters of municipal sewage; the night soil of Calcutta is disposed of in this way. India and the Philippines each have a million acres of mud-flats and mangrove swamps that could be utilized for fish-farming. Israel, after finding it too costly to wash the saline soil of the Valley of Bethshan, turned to fish-farming its brackish ponds, with the result that parts of Palestine that had been waste land for ages now support substantial settlements.

_____________

In addition to increased land and water harvests of conventional foods, we may expect in the near future a contribution to the world’s food supply of wholly new food resources created by the microbiologist and the chemurgist. Of these new foods the most promising at the moment is food yeast.

During World War II the Germans produced about sixteen thousand tons of food yeast a year by processes that used both hydrolyzed cull wood and the sulphite liquor of the wood pulp industry. TVA is now conducting pilot plant research designed to improve the German process of wood hydrolysis and utilize some part of the huge annual waste of American lumbering operations. This waste now amounts to about seventy per cent of the annual cutting. American sulphite mills annually pollute our streams with about half a million tons of mixed sugars capable of producing food yeast for consumption either by domestic animals or by human beings directly.

In recent experiments conducted in India by the British Medical Council, food yeast has successfully replaced meat and milk proteins at a fraction of the cost, providing in addition a full complement of the B vitamins in which the Indian diet is deficient. During World War II our own navy nutritionists stepped up the nutritional value of the navy diet by mixing food yeast into stews, soups, and cereal products, thereby incidentally improving their flavor and acceptability.

Recently microbiologists have developed new yeast containing fifty-five per cent of fat, so that the wood hydrolysis-yeast conversion operation can be conducted with either protein or fat as its end product and with important vitamin and mineral byproducts in either case.

The advantage of the forest-to-fat-and protein cycle from the point of view of the conservationist is that it may greatly increase the economic productivity of tree crops, which are soil conserving and which may be grown without fertilizers on soils and slopes that will not yield agricultural crops.

Even more exciting to the conservationist is a method of producing fat, sugar, and protein that by-passes the land altogether. This process employs as its raw material the enormous unused resource of the fresh- and salt-water algae. Already Stanford University microbiologists are producing edible fat from freshwater algae on a sizable laboratory scale. If this process can be successfully commercialized, as now seems probable, its possibilities are incalculable. Almost any pond can be made to produce many times as much algae carbohydrate per acre as can be grown on land, using the best agricultural technology known. In addition we have the wild algae crops of the ocean; at least forty-five million tons of giant seaweed could be harvested off our Pacific Coast alone.

_____________

Yes, the scientists’ promises are sound. Hunger is obsolete—if the scientists are given a free hand to develop food resources, everywhere. But against these technical potentialities, what practical steps can be marked up as already realized?

UNSCCUR itself, as was pointed out in the concluding plenary sessions of the conference, was such a practical step. The section meetings of the Conference brought together the most distinguished scientists and engineers of the various professional disciplines concerned with both exhaustible and renewable resources. The plenary sessions heard a number of able attempts to confront the problem of launching a general program for the development of resources on a global scale. When the proceedings of the conference are published, they alone will constitute a technical reference library of inestimable value. On this treasure house the Point Four¹ missions of our State Department and of the United Nations will undoubtedly draw heavily, each team selecting and utilizing such elements of the available science and technology as promise to break local bottlenecks most quickly and utilize the available natural and human resources most effectively.

All this, however, looks feeble and primitive when the exigencies—and the potentialities—of the existing situation are considered.

Actually, of course, the problem of hunger is beaten only statistically, on paper, by the balancing of real liabilities against potential assets. A psychological and moral and political revolution must be won, or at least well begun, before the technological revolution can achieve its final victory. As yet we have no concerted effort to conquer hunger. Instead, we have the cold war.

At the center of the problem is the issue of human freedom, dramatized at UNSCCUR by the abstention of the Soviet bloc—with possibly significant exceptions (the Poles and the Czechs sent papers, and the Yugoslavs were there in force).

_____________

Our modern food production potential is a product of the century and a half of political freedom enjoyed by the nations and peoples of the West. During the feudal period the seed of science lay dormant in the frozen soil of political and ideological absolutism. Food and freedom expanded together at the end of the 18th century: it is impossible to say which came first. It would seem, too, that food and freedom have contracted together under the neo-feudal regimes of Soviet Russia and her satellites. Certainly it is true that neither science nor technology have flourished on the dark side of the Iron Curtain. At UNSCCUR there were colleagues of the absent Russian geneticists whose laboratories were closed when the charlatan Lysenko took power, and colleagues of the distinguished Russian soil scientists who could have contributed much to the symposium but whose professional if not physical liquidation was even then being consummated.

In the lounges the delegates discussed the chain reaction by which extinction of political freedom leads to extinction of scientific freedom, which leads to scarcity. Russian agriculture and the Russian food supply, they predicted, must soon fed the disastrous effects of these political suppressions and perversions of science.

What is most disastrous, of course, is that it is impossible to induce the governments of the totalitarian states to appreciate the revolutionary implications of modern food-raising techniques, and difficult to inform their peoples. Russia and her satellites have boycotted FAO, World Health Organization, and other UN agencies upon which we must rely to implement our offensive against hunger. Hence today, as at the beginning of the modern era, what stands in the way of human survival is the limitation of that political freedom and freedom of communication without which the magnificent promise of science and technology cannot be fulfilled.

The President’s Point Four program, which is an attempt to realize this potentiality, is the logical extension of ECA. And because it represents the most effective kind of constructively democratic counter-thrust to Communist expansion, it is furiously attacked by Russia and her satellites. Moscow’s position on Point Four was fully exposed last September when the General Assembly of the United Nations debated the resolution calling for an expanded program of technical aid to under-developed countries, to be conducted under the auspices of the UN.

In these debates Communist spokesmen drew a sharp distinction between Point Four, which they denounced as a hypocritical disguise for the classic “Western imperialism,” and technical aid to under-developed countries, which they were obliged, for the record, to support Actually, of course, the Kremlin and its allies may be expected to sabotage the program consistently, and precisely because it exposes the most flagrant weaknesses of the Communist position. For Moscow is not prepared to export food, or freedom, or the technicians and technical aid that can be the means to both. (Indeed, in countries newly under its control, it has stripped them of resources and machines, and reduced technical facilities and standards.) Nor does it dare to exchange technicians or students with other countries. It can offer only propaganda, fifth columns, and, where its agents take power, censorship, police terror, and planned official looting for Soviet benefit—poor substitutes for the hybrid seed com, fertilizer plants, DDT, and investment capital for which the more or less revolutionary nationalist governments of the under-developed countries are now clamoring.

Moscow, at least, has no illusions about the implications of Point Four. In the present struggle between the two systems, victory will go to the side that can marshal the largest technological battalions. UNSCCUR proved that the West has them. But how soon will we bring them into action, and how effectively?

_____________

So far we are making no serious effort. The President’s request for forty-five million dollars to implement his Point Four program is no more than the smallest beginning—and even this modest request was received by Congress with marked coldness. It is clear that we are a long way from being committed to the pursuit of the global plenty which the scientists and technologists tell us is attainable.

Some of our reluctance is doubtless traceable to residual isolationism: the attitude that the rest of the world must “stand on its own feet.” Just as fundamental, perhaps, is our failure to understand that the armaments race is not in the long run a practicable means of winning the cold war and assuring our survival. We should be at once more aggressive and more imaginative. As things stand, armaments absorb most of our available resources, and we are obliged to economize on the only program that holds out a real hope of final victory: the global offensive against hunger.

Admittedly, there is no easy escape from the dilemma. The scientists at UNSCCUR saw that clearly enough, and many lounge discussions attempted to envisage what the strategy and tactics of a world offensive against hunger might be. Perhaps, some argued, the solution might lie in a formula that would project a huge expansion of United States and UN technical aid to countries both outside and inside the present sphere of Moscow’s control, including Communist China—this in exchange for a bilateral reduction of armaments (including fifth columns) backed up with hardboiled guarantees equivalent to those embodied in the Baruch plan for the control of atomic energy.

It is inconceivable that Moscow would accept such a formula. But its offer and rejection would project the major peace offensive that the West has needed. UNSCCUR has demonstrated the possibilities of such a peace offensive; the UN assembly is its natural sounding board; the Voice of America is an increasingly effective instrument with which to carry it to the emerging colonial peoples. They want food and peace and freedom, and they have only too much reason to know that these three are indivisible.

Because this country alone commands the resources needed, we hold the initiative. When will we use it?

_____________

¹ Point Four of President Truman’s Inaugural Address, now being used as the basis of a broad plan of international aid, envisaged “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of under-developed areas.”