Over a Century of; Food as a Weapon & how the table has turned

Food as a Weapon

By: Bertrand M. Patenaude

Herbert Hoover fed not only the citizens of Belgium but also, in the hope that they would throw off the Bolsheviks, the citizens of Soviet Russia. Bertrand M. Patenaude has another remarkable story.

After America entered the Great War in April 1917, Herbert Hoover was brought to Washington to serve as the U.S. food administrator under President Woodrow Wilson. His assignment was to enlarge the food supply of the United States and the Allies. This meant boosting food production and also promoting food conservation. “Food Will Win the War” was Hoover’s slogan. This was the moment when Hoover became a household name in America: To “Hooverize” entered the vocabulary as a synonym for economize.

Now you know the footnotes. But wait there's more.

When the war ended in November 1918, Hoover accompanied President Wilson to Paris to serve as adviser to the American delegation to the peace conference. He was made director general of relief for the Allied governments, essentially confirming his status as food administrator for all the Allies, and in January 1919 he was named principal executive of the Allied Supreme Economic Council. During the nine months after the Armistice, Hoover organized the distribution of more than $1 billion in relief, which translated into more than four million tons of food and other supplies delivered to children and adults across Europe, all the way to the inconstant borders of Bolshevik Russia.

$1 BILLION DOLLARS in 1919...in just food.

The food supplies that we wish to take to Russia are all in surplus in the United States, and are without a market in any quarter of the globe. . . . We are today feeding milk to our hogs, burning corn under our boilers. . . . I have a feeling we are dealing today with a situation of a great deal of [economic] depression and that we have a proper right to inquire not only whether we are doing an act of great humanity, but whether we are doing an act of economic soundness. To me, after assessing our ability to give, no other argument is needed beyond the sheer humanity.

Although no one at the time used the word, the objective was the containment of communism. Thirty years later, that would be the fundamental assumption behind the Marshall Plan.

We don't have that stockpile any more...

In fact our food has been used as a weapon against us.

Instead of being used for social benefit, today food has been used to control the people.

This is a dangerous precident, and a slippery slope.

I believe, all else equal, the government would do a better job at most everything if it was not corrupted by a plethora of unelected influences wielding tremendous financial power.

Ordinary citizens are being victimized by this exercise of "unofficial power".

Cheers

Food May Be the Ultimate Weapon in the 21st Century

By Hal Brands

President Joe Biden’s administration is reportedly rewriting its National Security Strategy, which the White House is required to send to Congress annually, to account for the lessons of the war in Ukraine. One issue that this document will have to grapple with outside its traditional focus on statecraft and diplomacy: food.



It certainly wouldn’t be the first time food and geopolitics have interacted in explosive ways. The Russian revolution of 1917 occurred when World War I had overburdened an inadequate railway system and made it impossible to feed an angry population. That revolution, in turn, knocked Russia out of the war; it also unleashed an ideology, communism, that helped make the 20th century history’s bloodiest.

A decade into the next century, the Arab Spring occurred in part due to rising food prices that set off mass unrest. The military and political upheaval in the Middle East has yet to fully subside, with civil wars in Syria and Libya among other effects. Food insecurity and international insecurity go together. Or, as my Johns Hopkins colleague Jessica Fanzo has written, “No food security, no world order.”

Found this article about the subject matter.

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

If politics could free itself of the economic shackles at least they could do a decent job.
Corruption is human, but you can mitigate it by cutting off the incentives. Like we did back when we separated church from state, about time we do the same with economy.

Politics is the only tool that is designed to represent and protect us and the biggest threat to the generals public well being is the free market...

a reply to: ADVISOR

Look at the UK which is a supposed first-world nation.

And yet we have near enough double the amount of foodbanks as we have McDonald's.

Where the likes of not just immigrants, and the unemployed, are using the facilities, but people with actual jobs who cannot afford to feed their families.

commonslibrary.parliament.uk...#:~:text=Food%20bank%20use%20in%20the%20UK&text=The%20DWP%20published%20statistics%20 on,and%20around%200%25%20of%20pensioners.

originally posted by: ADVISOR
We don't have that stockpile any more...

While we're not "burning corn under our boilers", we (the US) are still burning corn in our cars under Federal mandate.

originally posted by: Terpene
a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

If politics could free itself of the economic shackles at least they could do a decent job.

let's turn that around. imagine the economy if it could be freed from the shackles of politics.

Corruption is human, but you can mitigate it by cutting off the incentives. Like we did back when we separated church from state, about time we do the same with economy.

unfortunately the left/progressives/Democrats politicize everything, including the church.

Politics is the only tool that is designed to represent and protect us and the biggest threat to the general public well being is the free market...

you're saying the free market is a threat to the general public? this member of the public is more worried about hyperinvasive politics and politicians.
farmers are experts at producing food. let's leave them alone and let them do their jobs.

a reply to: Coelacanth55

Oh the naivety...

You mean lleaving them alone, as in exposed to the presure of the marked, forced to use Pestizides like roundup, monoculture, and synthetic fertilizer to meet the minimum production, all the while they erode the land and peoples health? Yeah worked out very well so far...

How will farmers in the mountains compete?
Oh... they Won't!
Go to every 1st world country and talk to the farmers in the mountains they'll all tell you the same.
Now go to Switzerland and ask them.
they're really happy they get subventions from politics because we all see the value to the land and culture in it, not monetary profit.
You will never see the free market value anything but profit ...

General Motors doing business with IG farben during world war 2.
Bayer pharmaceutical sending aids infected plasma to 3rd world country.

Just to name two where politics and the populous wozld have never agreed to... You my friend lack the understanding of the greater mechanisms at work... With the free market there is only one value and only one which is profit.

Your life is worth just the amount that can be squezed out in money, not one iota more.

With the advent of robotics and AI, i wonder what profit can be made off of you.

Do you want a world where all values are defined trough money and profit?
Where all other standards of what means a good, healty and happy life is solely measured with money?
that's what we get when the free market takes over.
You think CDBC is is a political tool?

Think again, it's a tool that circumvents politics and puts big business in charge of politics trough monetary incentives...

WEF, world economic forum championing the free market.
Bilderberg is the same. They are not political institutions. They operate beyond your puny borders and their political show they are global forces. They laugh about nationalists limited worldviews...

Now of course politicians have to first agree to the terms and conditions business is alowed to milk their citizens. Denying them that would be bad for profit.

The whole world is in debt every country on the planet except a few are in dept so deep it's unreal.
Who are they owning to?

Seems like some have been thoroughly indoctrinated with a dichotomous ideology so they can't see who their real enemy is...

um, okay, I'm not a laissez-faire Ferengi. sure farmers need some limits.
but I'd rather leave the farmers alone than have them bound to meet infinite absurd restrictions imposed by liberal-arts college kidiots who have never grown so much as a tomato in their lives.

how would you feel about using DDT in the third world to combat malaria? would the lives saved be worth the environmental damage?

organic farming sounds fun but its disastrous to productivity.
Sri Lanka's college kids tried that and they had to import food. from countries using fertilizer and pesticides.

reason.com...#:~:text=Sri%20Lanka%20banned%20all%20synthetic%20ferti lizers.

a reply to: Coelacanth55

Most farms around here pass trough a process that takes up to 7 years.

pretty stupid to think you can go from death Soil and a fertilizer mix to keep it all going to living soil in a day.

It's not a problem at all if government gives financial aids in the important parts, mainly knowledge and transition...

You know what's infinite and absurd?
steady economic growth...

Foodbanks and handouts are big business for the managers. The local senior center has an organizer and her husband. They knock down $50k each to be there to accept trucks and hand out food. Everybody wants the job.