1932 - Food Availability

Food Availability

Famine in the Ukraine and in the Caucasus begins taking a heavy toll. Not caused by nature, it is a deliberate, man-made famine created by dictator Josef Stalin, partly to raise capital for Soviet industrialization by selling grain abroad but also to force independent farmers into collectives, where they will work like serfs. Stalin has his troops seize livestock, seeds, and food stocks and keeps relief trains carrying food from entering the affected areas in order to force compliance of farmers with his collectivization efforts. Protesters are shot down with machine guns; in the next few years some 7 million people—one quarter of the population in the affected areas—will die of hunger and related causes.

United Mine Workers boss John L. Lewis is quoted in the New York Times January 25 as saying, "The only thing that apparently inspires the Red Cross to extend assistance is a conflagration, flood, pestilence, and war. It doesn't make any difference to them how many people die of starvation, how many children suffer from malnutrition, or how many women are weakened" (see 1931).

More Americans are hungry or ill-fed than ever before in the nation's history. The usual weekly relief check for a family of five in New York City is $6 in May, and the average weekly grant in Philadelphia that month is reduced to $4.39 (Philadelphia's relief funds will soon give out completely, leaving 57,000 families with no means of support). Nearly a million Americans go back to the land.

Congress votes March 7 to authorize giving needy Americans 40 million bushels of wheat held by the Federal Farm Bureau, which has bought the wheat in order to maintain prices. Distribution is to be handled by the Red Cross, which agrees reluctantly to take on the job, and another 45 million bushels of wheat are added July 5, plus 250 million pounds of cotton. By February of next year the Red Cross will have distributed more than 8.5 million barrels of flour to 5,140,855 families in almost every county in America.

Workers on the Hoover Dam project in Nevada eat better than most Americans, getting all the food they want for $1.15 per day.