Remarks to the Members of the Youth Conference on Famine Relief.

IT IS a pleasure for me this morning to welcome you to Washington, particularly for the purpose for which you are here. We have heard a great deal about famine and malnutrition, and things of that sort. It is a very real situation to the people who have not enough to eat.

We are rather proud of our contribution to the feeding of the world. Our commitments last November were for 225 million bushels of food grains. We have furnished to date 417 million bushels of food grains. But that is nothing for us to brag about. We furnished those food grains because we happen to be the country that had them. That doesn't mean that everybody, while he didn't starve, received enough to eat.

You can make a contribution to this situation with which we are faced--and we are still faced with it, in spite of the fact that we almost doubled our quota--by bringing home to our people the necessity for still contributing to the feeding of the world.

A lot of people now will be saying to you that they are sick and tired of hearing of starvation and want. Maybe they are, because this great country of ours very seldom comes to the point where any segment of its population is on a starvation basis. We can't appreciate what goes on in those countries that have had their farms and their homes and their property completely destroyed. I wish all of you could see the situation as it really is in Poland and Greece and Hungary and Austria and Germany and China. You would understand then just exactly what it means, and what war and pestilence really mean. You would know what the Four Horsemen look like. Now it is up to you young people to make a contribution to the feeding and the care of the people who cannot feed and care for themselves.

I would like to have a report from you in 12 months to see just exactly what you have done toward bringing home to our people the necessity for their continuing to help feed the world. It is going to take another year or two--maybe three--before those countries can get back on a production basis so that they can even contribute to their own support. We are going to help them all we can with machinery and tools and the wherewithal to raise food, but it will be some time before those destroyed countries can get back on a basis where they can feed themselves.

I appreciate very much your interest in this matter. I appreciate very much your interest, because I know youth can keep the fires burning that will cause us to be able to see that the world does not starve, after winning the victory for freedom and right. Thank you very much.