Hot Springs and After
This week's meeting of the interim committee appointed by the United Nations Food Conference which sat at Hot Springs in May should carry an important enterprise a necessary stage farther. The Hot Springs Conference, judged by the nature of the conclusions reached and the unanimity on which they were based, was a notable success, but its findings in no way bound the Governments of the countries represented. Those Governments have now considered the conference's recommendations and most of them, notably our own, have accepted them unreservedly. The commission now meeting is therefore more authoritative than the original conference. Its business will be to draft some kind of charter, or statement of general principles, to he accepted by the nations, on standards of nutrition and the planned and scientific increase of food production throughout the world, and also to submit plans for the creation of a permanent international body to direct that great and hopeful undertaking. Hot Springs had a double importance, derived both from the problems with which it had to deal and from the fact that it was the first full conference of all the United Nations to assemble since war broke out. The same will apply to the machinery constructed to translate into action the principles the conference laid down. There will be the immediate task in hand to be discharged ; there will also, incidentally to that, be a working model to construct mechanism to which the United Nations may need to resort in many fields in the near future. It is easier to preach international co-operation than to achieve it. Hence the value of pioneer work such as this.
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