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George McGovern was U.S. Senator from South Dakota from 1963 to 1981, and the Democratic candidate for president in 1972. He was the first director of the U.S. Food for Peace Program. McGovern is now U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies on Food and Agriculture in Rome.

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The Third Freedom

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Chapter One: A Strategy to Defeat World Hunger

In the blistering, heart-rending drought and depression days of 1932 I was a ten-year-old boy growing up in Mitchell, South Dakota. Most of the time I was a contented youngster, but some memories are not pleasant. A lifetime later, I recall the huge boiling dust clouds that rolled across the parched Dakota plains, hiding the sun in a darkness like midnight. The finely ground dirt not only blackened the sky; it came hard at the crevices of our eyes, ears, noses, and throats. The tiniest cracks or openings in windows and doors ushered the dust inside.

The first such fearful storm that I remember happened during a summer hike several miles east of Mitchell with my boyhood friend Vernon Hersey. After failing efforts to grope our way in the blinding dust to a country road, Vernon suggested that the Milwaukee railroad tracks would lead us back to Mitchell. We followed them homeward, listening over the howling wind for a train whistle.

When the Dakota sun was not blotted out by dust storms, it was frequently shrouded by flying grasshopper invasions. They could strip growing crops down to the ground in a matter of hours. Farmers who had invested their cash and months of labor in planting and nurturing crops would watch their harvest disappear. The voracious pests would even devour the wooden handles of hoes and pitchforks.

My father was a Wesleyan Methodist clergyman who believed in God, John Wesley (the founder of Methodism), and the St. Louis Cardinals. This "Holy Trinity" helped our household get through the Depression. I knew about the Twelve Apostles, but I knew even more about the Cardinals' "Gashouse Gang" -- Dizzy and Daffy Dean, Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Joe Medwick, Frankie Frisch -- and from that day to this, the first item I have looked for in the morning paper is the standing of the St. Louis Cardinals. (As I write, they are in first place in their division, of course!)

One day in the autumn of 1932, my dad took me pheasant hunting, which included a stop at our friend Art Kendall's farm, ten miles southwest of Mitchell. Kendall was one of my heroes, a hardworking farmer and a devout member of my dad's congregation. I admired his prowess in hunting pheasants, which was not only an enjoyable sport, but also enriched our tables. Art was the best shot with a 12-gauge, double-barreled shotgun I ever saw. He also had a sense of humor -- of a kind. On my first trip carrying a small-gauge shotgun, he told me that there was a rabbit just ahead of me. I saw something move and promptly filled it with buckshot. It was a skunk, as Art knew, and it sprayed its dreadful perfume all over me before expiring. I was invited to ride on the outside fender of the car for the rest of the day. I can still hear Art Kendall's laughter.

Not only did I learn about skunks that day, but I received another, more serious lesson. When my dad and I arrived at Art's farm to pick him up, we found him sitting on his back porch looking at a slip of paper. As we approached him, I realized that he had been crying. How could this be -- big, strong, brave Art Kendall crying? It was the first time I had seen an adult cry, except for my mother the night Grandma died. Why was he crying? Because he had just received a check for all of his hogs barely big enough to cover the trucker's fee for hauling them to the livestock market in Sioux City, Iowa. Art had worked for a year feeding his corn crop to those hogs and getting them ready for market. In the end, he netted nothing. This was the kind of ruinous price level that choked a farmer's spirit and sent him into bankruptcy.

Over the years, when I saw how hard farmers worked and how little they frequently received for their labor, it broke my heart. That happened for a long, hard decade when I was a boy. A similar downturn has hit the farm economy during the present decade.

In the mid to late 1920s, American farmers were primed to produce. They had geared up a magnificent agricultural machine in response to the demand generated by World War I. Farmers were similarly primed to produce in the mid-1990s Global demand for American agricultural products was high, and projected to grow higher.

Farmers in the post-World War I period saw the bottom fall out of their markets when foreign countries cinched their belts as war debts forced them to economize. Similarly, the growth projected for agricultural markets in the 1990s has been stunted by the Asian financial crisis. To compound the difficulties, both the mid-1920s and the late 1990s were characterized by larger than average crops -- a blessing turned into a curse. Farmers were not earning enough from the sale of their crops or animals to cover production costs in either of these two periods.

Financial stress, then as now, accelerated the trend toward reducing the number of farmers -- a trend that technological advances have amplified throughout the century as more food is produced with fewer farmers.

When Henry Wallace became secretary of agriculture in 1933, he put his keen mind to work on crafting the most innovative package of government farm programs ever -- a package that became a central part of the Roosevelt administration's New Deal. Wallace's approach was to provide incentives for farmers to cut back on production while markets were glutted and prices were low. His plan for an "ever normal granary" enabled farmers to protect their markets by storing surplus grain in times of bumper crops. They were allowed to borrow from the federal government against their stored harvests. When production was down and prices were higher, they could then profitably sell their grain and pay off their loans. This ingenious approach worked and is a prime reason that Henry A. Wallace is acknowledged by many as the most important agricultural leader of the twentieth century. This system, or some version of it, was the basic agricultural law of the land from the mid-1930s for the next sixty years until Congress terminated it, I think unwisely, in 1996. The Freedom to Farm Act of that year did give farmers more freedom to plant as much grain as they wished, but it left them with no price stabilization system. Once acreage restrictions were lifted, surpluses mounted, and in the absence of any price support floor, farm prices collapsed. I have heard more than a few farmers describe this congressional action as the Freedom to Go Broke Act.

As a youth in South Dakota, I saw anxious parents trying to stretch scarce dollars to feed their families. I also saw the steady stream of hoboes who came to our door asking for food. My father and mother never once said no to these young men, who were riding the rails looking for work. But not until I arrived in Italy in 1944 had I seen the kind of hunger that stunts young bodies and can end lives prematurely.

In September that year, I was on board a troopship as it eased into Naples harbor. In the approach to the docking area, I could see scores of Italian children lining up and shouting to us to throw Hershey bars, Babe Ruths, and Wrigley's gum. At this point the ship's captain broke in over the loudspeaker and ordered us not to throw anything to the youngsters. He explained that children in war-torn Italy were hungry -- on the edge of starvation -- and that a few days earlier, when American troops had thrown candy from an incoming ship, some of it fell into the water and a number of...