ustxtxb_obs_1967_03_31_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

Observations Austin “The great lesson of our time is the interdependence of man,” President Johnson said to the Congress in announcing his program to avert famine in India this year. A farmer in McLennan County, or on the High Plains, lives in his specific farmhouse and works his own land, well known to him; but he is part now of a world whose nations interlock. The Texas legislature prepares to permit Texas cities to sales-tax their citizens, and to hell with the poor, who must pay the most, under this plan, proportional to how much they have. And this legislature, too, must answer to posterity, if 70 million people suffer famine in India next year. Cong. Jim Wright of Fort Worth was in Austin March 13 to give a speech to the Texas Water Conservation Assn., which sounds like a mighty provincial organization, but Wright wasted no time telling them what their work is. “If widespread famine is to be avoided,” he said, “we must cultivate an entirely new and enlightened relationship to the earth and its provender.. . “No longer will agricultural surpluses be our problem. Instead, we approach the time when we shall need millions of additional acres in production if we are merely to feed our own people let alone the famine-bent billions of a hungry world. “Every drop of water that can be conserved, every inch of topsoil that can be saved, every field and forest we can renew, every ore and mineral we can de 16 The Texas Observer velop and conserve, and every stream we can cleanse of pollution will be our greatest possible gifts to future generations,” said Wright, \( who seems to me, in the last year, to have begun to sound like a statesman, rather than a politician trying Bob Poage comes from up at Waco. But he is also, now, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, and earlier this year the President sent him to India to see for himself what it’s like there in this, the second year of drouth in the northern part, and where, but for U.S. aid, 70 million people would be starving now, this year, and would have last year, too. Poage reported to Johnson, in February the President told the Congress, “our generation can no longer evade the growing imbalance between food production and population growth. . . . The first obligation of the community of man is to provide food for all its members. This obligation overrides political differences and differences in social systems. . . . Every country must participate to insure the future of all.” Last year India received eight million tons of food from the U.S. and imported two million tons from other countries, principally Canada, Australia, and Russia. This year, Johnson told Congress, our aid is dependent on the rest of the world matching it. He said, and Congress, in a resolution now enacted, specified, that we will feed half of India’s starving people, provided the rest of the world feeds the other half. This is a good way to get the rest of the world to help, as the rest of the world should: What if they don’t? Do we let, say, 20 or 30 million Indians starve this year? It’s inconceivable. Since 1951 the U.S. has provided India about 50 million tons of food grains. This is how it works under the 1967 program. India pays for the food \( wheat, grain sorWe give India 12% of the price for financing economic development projects and 10% for birth control and child and maternal welfare; we lend them 65% to finance economic development projects; we reserve 5% for loans to private firms in which there is joint Indian-American collaboration; the remaining 8% pays U.S. expenses in India. India has imposed food rationing, streamlined her transportation for food distribution, increased prices paid to her farmers, introduced new varieties of rice from Taiwan and large quantities of highyielding wheat seed from Mexico, doubled her public investment in agriculture during a new five-year plan, done her best to spread family planning, and negotiated an agreement for an externally-financed fertilizer plant, the first, it is planned, of several. But already, ten thousand men, women, and children die of hunger every day, somewhere in the world. All of us live henceforth with this possibility, even this likelihood, that what we fail to do will starve someone to death. “The great lesson of our time,” said the President, “is the interdependence of man.” R. D. Hobby Fdn. and the C.I.A. I notice in your [Mar. 3] issue the sentence “The Observer has come across no [Houston] Post stories about the Hobby Foundation, though a story about the involvement of Houston’s M. D. Anderson Foundation with the C.I.A. was on the Post’s front page a day before the Hobby Foundation was said, by the New York Times, to be involved.” I enclose for your information a tearsheet of the front page of the Houston Post of Feb. 21, 1967, containing the story you missed.Bill Hobby, president and executive editor, The Houston Post, Houston, Tex., 77001. Mr. Hobby is a trustee of the Hobby Foundation, which was founded by his parents. The Feb. 21 Post story he refers to. ran under a two-column headline: “Hobby Foundation Is Proud of C.I.A. Service.” The first two paragraphs of the story say that the foundation had cooperated with the C.I.A. and the foundation’s trustees were “proud to have been of service to our government. . . .” The rest of the story was a round-up of aspects of the situation not related to the Hobby Foundation. On Feb. 19 the New. York Times had revealed the foundation’s connection with the C.I.A.; on Feb. 20 a Times reporter interviewed Mr. Hobby about this.Ed. More Graffiti Larry King Shaves. J. D. Frazee, 317 Cranbrook, Waco, Texas. eountv Seaf sit down up against a pecan tree on the lawn of a courthouse in texas: august. sunday if possible, read if you want. nobody will bother you but little mexican boys going thru redlites on their obsolete schwinns H. C. NASH