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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, SEPTEMBER 2, 1983
PAGE 12
tionary authority available to it under United States law to con
trol exports of commodities purchased for supply to the U.S.S.R."
in accordance with tonnages set out in Article 1 of the agree
ment.
This would appear to rule out any further grain-trade
sanctions against the Soviet Union until the agreement expires in
1988....
After four poor harvests in a row, the Soviet Union now is reap
ing what appears to be its best grain harvest since 1978, esti
mated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at 200 million tons.
U.S. officials still expect the Soviets to import about 30
million tons this year, however, partly to replenish what are
thought to be seriously depleted state reserves.
Could we thus begin to see the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 28:33: "A nation
whom you have not known shall eat the fruit of your land and the produce of
your labor..."?
Famine Can Strike--Quicklyl
When one thinks of famine and pestilence, especially in connection with the
ravages of war, the mind often turns to the scourges of the Middle Ages or
perhaps the aftermath of great and long-riding conflicts in Europe during
the 1600s. But modern society, too, is vulnerable--perhaps many times more
so--to the sudden and cataclysmic onset of famine. Just why is explained in
an article in the August 19 issue of the TIMES of London entitled, "Famine,
the Forgotten Enemy."
Though the linkage between war and hunger is well established,
there is a tendency to forget how much starvation can contribute
to the horrors that arise from a conflict.
We remember the
damage and death resulting from high-level bombing of cities dur
ing the Second World War to a far greater extent than the deaths
caused by shortage of food. Of course, this can be partly ex
plained by the fact that in Britain we did not suffer from short
ages to the extent that real hunger resulted and that in the
United States and Canada food supply was never a problem.
This state of affairs did not apply to other countries.•.• The
siege of Leningrad, which lasted for some 900 days, resulted in a
shortage of food such as no other industrialized city has ever
experienced. More than half the population is thought to have
perished from hunger. Equally, we tend to forget that the last
winter of the Second World War led to such shortages of food in
The Netherlands that only a few months before the liberation
there was doubt whether the Dutch population would survive at
all....
Even these events pale beside the great Bengal famine of 1942,
which arose out of the disruption to supplies of food from
coun
tries farther east, notably Thailand and Burma, as a direct con
sequence of the global conflict.
Twenty million people are
supposed to have perished from hunger in Bengal. Nearly the same
total died in the Soviet Union as a result of direct enemy
action, yet the devastation in Bengal is barely remembered out
side the Indian subcontinent.