"When in Rome ... "

In the West, there is increasing talk of triage .... If the US decides that the grant would simply go down the drain as a mere palliative because the recipient country wa$ doing little to improve its food distribution or start a population control program, no help would be sent. This may be a brutal policy, but it is perhaps the only kind that can have any long-range impact. A triage approach could also demand political concessions ... . Washington may feel no obligation to help countries that consistently and strongly oppose it. As Earl Butz told Time, "Food is a weapon. It is now one of the principal tools in our negotiating kit."8

Providing food, however, was not to be the real weapon. The denial of food-famine-was.

"When in Rome ... " During the Cold War, Washington consistently opposed the creation of internationally held grain reserves. The virtual depletion of world food stocks prompted the 1974 UN World Food Conference meeting in Rome. In 1972, when the world suffered an exceptionally poor harvest, there were 209 million metric tons of grain, some 66 days' worth, in world reserve. In .1974 there were record grain crops worldwide, yet the grain reserve was reduced to 25 million metric tons, or 37 days. In 1975 there was estimated to be a 27-day reserve after exceptionally large grain harvests.9

The problem was that the grain was there, but it was in the hands of a handful of giant grain trading companies, all of them American. This was the element that Kissinger had in mind when he spoke of food as a weapon.

George McGovern, chairman of the Senate Committee on Human Nutrition, stated atthe time, "Private traders are in business to turn investments into profit as rapidly as possible ... In reality a reserve in private hands is no reserve at all. It is indeed precisely the same market mechanism which has produced the situation we face today."l0

McGovern was not appreciated by the US establishment for such comments. His bid against Nixon for the Presidency in 1972 was doomed to be a disastrous defeat for traditional elements in the