I watched a special on PBS recently concentrating specifically on the Russian famine and how the U.S. under Herbert Hoover's ARA's direction saved millions of people in Europe and Russia.
If Fukashima contaminates the U.S. food supply, who will feed us? Assuming other countries even have a surplus which most do not, they would sell it most expensively and then again for what? What would the U.S. have to offer for trade - useless money, technology, natural (contaminated) resources, etc. Other than gold or silver, what could a contaminated U.S. have to offer up to the world for food?
HOOVER'S HUMANITARIAN VISION
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link to www.rememberinghoover.be]
When the United States entered the war in 1917, Hoover returned home and soon became head of the U. S. Food Administration, an agency created at the request of President Woodrow Wilson. Hoover's challenge was formidable: he must--by suasion, if possible; by coercion, if necessary--stimulate American food production, reduce American food consumption, curb inflation of food prices, and create a substantial food surplus for export to America's needy allies. "Food Will Win the War" was his slogan: an exaggeration, perhaps, but not if stated negatively. A dearth of food would surely lose the conflict. By the autumn of 1918 America, under its food controller's guidance, had become a cornucopia upon which the beleaguered British, French, and Italians--our allies--could draw with confidence.
On November 16, 1918--just five days after the Armistice--Hoover set sail for Europe to organize food distribution to a continent careening towards disaster. In the months following the end of World War I, across vast stretches of Europe, famine, disease, and bloody revolution threatened to sunder a civilization already traumatized by "the war to end war." While American and Allied leaders struggled to draft a peace treaty at Versailles, Hoover, as Director-General of Relief for the Allied and Associated Powers and chairman of the American Relief Administration (ARA), organized the delivery of food to desperate people by the millions and helped to stem the advance of Bolshevik revolution from the East.
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Still another Hoover innovation was the invention of a form of remittance known as food drafts by which American citizens could send aid to their kinsfolk in Europe. Any American could purchase such a draft at a bank in the United States and mail it to his relatives in Europe. The Europeans could then present this draft at American relief warehouses established in their own country and receive in exchange carefully standardized packages of food equivalent to the amount stated on the draft.
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Undoubtedly the most extraordinary ARA undertaking occurred more than two years after the war ended, in Soviet Russia. There, from 1921 to 1923, at the request of Communist authorities, Hoover's agency administered a gigantic relief program to combat a devastating famine in the Volga River region. At its peak the organization fed upwards of 10,000,000 people a day. s of Russian lives from the ARA...
United States