Watching the World 8

Food Picture Worsens

As 1974 draws to a close, the bleak outlook for feeding the world grows darker. Here is how food authorities see the situation:

● “Nineteen-seventy-four was the year the weatherman pulled all the wrong levers,” declares U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) official Don Paarlberg. “Disappointing” crops have struck at the very time good ones are needed to restore perilously short stocks. “By the end of this crop year they are going to be scraping the bins,” warns Paarlberg.

● What is the outlook for next year? Late USDA projections indicate that the world will produce over 36 million tons less grain during the 1974-75 marketing year than it consumed during the year ending June 30, 1974! That would have been enough to feed about 150 million people. Meanwhile, about 78 million persons will be added to the world population.

● “Father” of the “green revolution,” Norman Borlaug, cautions: “The stage is set for real trouble.” He says that he still stands by his earlier warning that “tens of millions of people could die this year from climatic changes and the shortage of fertilizer.” Early harbingers of what is to come are already beginning.

● “People are dying in dozens,” says the acting chief of the World Health Organization in Dacca, Bangladesh. “Cholera has broken out in epidemic form in many places” because hunger has left poor villagers “with no resistance to infection.” Shipping and communications problems are keeping promised relief food weeks or months away. “The Government appears to be resigned to the inevitability of large-scale starvation deaths,” notes the New York Times.

● Local greed also complicates relief measures. In one starving African country, local truck owners charged the highest ton-per-mile rate in the world to haul relief grain! “We have the monopoly and we fix the tariffs,” boasted their head. They refused to allow cheaper and faster relief trucks from a nearby country to haul the food—while their countrymen starved.

‘No Place to Hide’

? U.S. Attorney-General Saxbe recently declared that the sharp upswing in crime statistics indicates a near future that “is enough to evoke a shudder from even the most optimistic. There could no longer be any place to hide—no safe zones, not for anybody. In fact, we may be near that point already.” Rapidly spreading suburban and small-town drug addiction and crime punctuate his statement.

Population and Religion

? With increasing frequency religion is being blamed directly or indirectly for world population problems. The Catholic Church is known to oppose officially most birth-control measures. Now World Health Organization official Abdel R. Omran, an Arab, admits in the U.N.’s Ceres magazine that Islam is also involved in the problem. He notes that its religious leaders “invoke religious doctrine to oppose family planning.” Further, Omran adds that in most of the countries where Islam predominates, for “sociocultural” reasons “it is still essential for women to be highly fertile . . . and contraception is not yet widely accepted.”—July-August 1974.

Fighting Back the Tide

? Threatening legal action, a Catholic civil-rights group recently forced a giant, well-known U.S. corporation to withdraw its booklet on population control intended for classroom discussion. The New Orleans, Louisiana, Catholic Clarion Herald reports that the booklet asks whether students would support a move “to bring the Church before a world court or another international tribunal to be tried for crimes against humanity.” The section, titled “The Pope’s Views on Birth Control,” follows with an argument suggesting that the Church is responsible for “requiring millions of people to have unwanted children,” who are doomed “to death at an early age” or “a life of misery and suffering.”

Fearful Bankers

? The recent annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed world bankers staggering from blows to the international economic system, “We banks are up to our limits for financing Italy, France, Britain and others. We . . . cannot prudently go further,” says Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, former managing director of the IMF. And West German Finance Minister Hans Apel marvels: “Never in the three decades of the Fund and the Bank has inflation posed a more universal threat to the world’s economic and social system.”

Is “Recycling” the Answer?

? Much has been said about how oil-producing countries can use the excess money accumulated by them from recently quadrupled oil prices. Many claim that they can use these “petrodollars” to help oil-importing countries avoid economic breakdown caused by the huge oil costs. They say that oil producers should “recycle” the excess funds into the economies of the importers through investments and loans. Is this realistic? No, says a Business Week editorial. It calls the idea “simply an exercise in self-deceit,” and adds: “Recycling would build an enormous structure of constantly increasing debt” to oil producers “that could not by any stretch of the imagination be paid off.”

Rome’s “Window Dressing”

? Though topics such as abortion and population control were the Catholic bishops’ first choice for their fourth International Synod, reports the Jesuit weekly America, Pope Paul selected evangelization. However, before the meeting delegates were “bombarded with documents” that had little to do with even that subject, writes Rome theology instructor Francis X. Murphy. Many in the Church, he says, view the gathering as “little more than window dressing” and believe it “will have little impact on the people preaching the gospel . . . and even less on those to whom that preaching is addressed.”

“Holy” Synod and Communists

? For the first time, Communist North Vietnam and East Germany have church delegates representing them at the month-long fourth Synod of Bishops in the Vatican. The presence of the archbishops of Hanoi and East Berlin reflects the softening Vatican approach to Communist states, where churches who accommodate to the party line are the only ones that survive legally.

Clergy—Moral?

? U.S. newspaper columnist Ann Landers reports on a polling of her readers who had been approached for immoral relations by professional men. “The results were staggering,” she writes. “It was a dead heat between the doctors and the clergymen,” who were a close second. Prior to the poll, she notes her astonishment at the number of women who had written that “the one to keep an eye on was the clergyman.”

“Most Important Health Measure”

? In its review of the book Smoking Behavior, Science magazine says that “the sum total of human disease, disability, death, and lost productivity directly attributable to cigarette smoking is so staggering that a reduction . . . may be the single most important health measure open to us for the foreseeable future. In the United States, one-third of all the deaths for men aged 35 to 59 would not have occurred if cigarette smokers had the same death rates as non-smokers.”

“Mouse Roulette”

? English Catholic priest Patrick Norton had two mice flown in from Ireland to star in a fund-raising gambling game he calls “mouse roulette.” The enterprising priest had a “roulette table” constructed with holes for the mice to go down. Religious gamblers place bets on their favorite mouse to go into a certain numbered hole. If the mouse prefers a blank hole, the church profits. “I think it will be a real money spinner,” enthused the gambling-promoter priest.

Untapped Oil

? Nearly a billion gallons of used engine crankcase oil are poured down drains or onto vacant lots in the U.S. every year, reports Business Week magazine. Only 20 percent of such oil is re-refined and used again, whereas, in West Germany, about two thirds is recycled.

Evolution “Mystery”

? Evolution, like religious dogma, must often retreat to the shelter of “mystery” when confronted with the facts. Cornell University biologist John L. Cisne again acknowledges in Science magazine that “one of the mysteries in the history of life has been why hard parts of a variety of invertebrate animals . . . should appear rather suddenly in the fossil record.” The popular “predation theory” (the claim that hard shells developed as protection from predators and parasites) creates another “mystery.” Cisne reveals that these creatures themselves apparently “were the first larger predators to appear in the fossil record”!—October 4, 1974.

‘Don’t Confuse Them’

? A religious person recently wrote to the fundamentalist paper The Sword of the Lord asking whether he should carry his Bible when “soul winning.” The writer, who says, “I have belonged to two good Bible-preaching churches,” notes that one of his preachers advised him to put the Bible in his pocket when visiting others. Why? “You don’t want to confuse them into thinking you are a . . . Jehovah’s Witness.”

“Church on Four Wheels”

? That is how many French Catholics jokingly refer to their attachment to the Church, reports the New York Times. The baby carriage, the wedding car and the funeral hearse are the only way most of them come to church. Though only a fifth of French Catholics attend Mass regularly, three out of four want church ceremonies for these events. Why? The fact that people want to get married in the church does not mean they have a Catholic faith,” says a Paris priest who headed an official study of the subject. “It’s something they grew accustomed to, like steak and French fries.”

Priests in Rome

? Pope Paul VI recently complained at length about the “abandoning of religious observances by entire populations” and the “many seminaries” that “are nearly deserted” as well as religious orders that “have trouble finding new followers.” Such problems are literally at the pope’s own doorstep. “Rome ranks among the Catholic cities with the smallest number of native priests,” reports Rome’s Daily American. “Less than half a dozen were ordained this year in this City of three million inhabitants.”

Champion Garbage-Makers?

? The New York Daily News reports that metropolitan “New Yorkers produce a total of 30,000 tons of garbage every day,” or “an average of six pounds per person per day,” too much of which “winds up as street litter.” That is said to be more trash than the combined total produced by three average residents in Tokyo, London and Paris, respectively. Excessive packaging materials may explain the extra trash, and poor facilities for disposal and cleanup may explain some of the street litter. But another reason is “a feeling of not belonging” in the big city, says one psychologist. “It’s not my world, my city, my street, and so why should I take care of it?” is the attitude many take.