Food Aid: Distribute It--Maybe Even Retail It : Struggling former Soviets need more than cargo drops

At the end of World War I, America sent Herbert Hoover. At the end of World War II, we sent George C. Marshall. Whom will we send at the end of the Cold War?

Hoover headed the American Relief Committee, which fed Europe between 1915 and 1919. After the armistice, Hoover’s American Relief Assn. took food and other relief to as many as 200 million Europeans. In 1921-1923, when famine struck the Ukraine, the association spent the 1991 equivalent of $1 billion and saved perhaps 10 million lives.

That chapter in U.S. history may be largely forgotten. Better remembered is the Marshall Plan. In 1947, Secretary of State Marshall, aware that the economic collapse of Western Europe would quickly become a victory for the Soviet Union, proposed that governments there petition the United States for assistance. They did so, and a package of recovery legislation made its way, not without difficulty, through an isolationist Congress.

In 1992 the challenge that faces us combines both earlier ones. It is 1921 in that famine threatens. It is 1951 in that our goal is not just to save lives but also to shore up, economically, the fragile political structures that guarantee freedom. Neither element must be forgotten. Attending too little to the political consequences of relief, Hoover, in effect, allowed the Soviet Union to survive until Stalin could come to power and create, in the Ukrainian terror-famine of 1933, a horror that vastly exceeded the natural famine of the early 1920s.

The magnitude of both the relief and the reconstruction called for in the 1990s exceeds the resources of the United States. Required is nothing less than a coordinated international effort combining, as in the Gulf War, U.S. logistic capacity with European and Japanese money to pay for what the cargo ships and cargo planes carry. Even then, if the aid is simply turned over to the newborn, post-Soviet regimes as they now exist, it is likely that the black market that so effectively eluded Soviet regulation will frustrate honest relief and reconstruction as well.

This is where the Hoover model turns out to offer something after all, for Hoover sent people as well as materiel. In cooperation with local authorities, the American Relief Assn. directly administered 18,000 feeding stations, according to Graham Allison of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. If a new network of such stations averts famine and if the credit redounds to the post-communist regimes of the Commonwealth of Independent States, we may regard the money as well spent.

But averting famine and building political reputation gets us only partway down the agenda. If we give food to those who can’t pay but sell it to those who can, the larger result of the exercise will be to midwife the birth of a capitalist distribution system that, after the crisis has passed, will go on to distribute many goods other than (and better than!) surplus Army rations.

Even with coalition funding, the cost of Hoover and Marshall rolled into one will be high. But the cost of the alternative--a return to the Cold War--is much higher. The peace that is paying us the peace dividend is a bargain at almost any price.