The Economics of Public Measures to Subsidize Food Consumption

pre-war. 2. It is generally anticipated that there will be, at least temporarily during the reconversion of industry, some decline in employment and earnings and hence in demand for food. 3. Legislation1 requires support of prices of most of the chief farm products at not less than 90 percent of parity for at least two years after the war. At the same time the war has focused attention on nutrition, and has broadened educational work on selection of adequate diets. It has likewise shown the food-consuming capacity of the American buying public when it has the money to spend. And the war has presented the challenge to mobilize our resources for full peacetime production and consumption as effectively as we mobilized them for fighting. High-level production and consumption of food have an essential place in a program to achieve this. Public measures to subsidize the consumption of food offer an obvious means of attacking these post-war problems. Hence the returning attention to the surplus disposal programs of the depression. Hence, likewise, the discussion of market-wide price subsidies to bridge the gap between the enacted support prices to producers and the prices at which the resulting production will sell. Hence the rising interest in proposals like the National Food Allotment Plan for assuring all people an adequate diet, come prosperity or depression.