Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (23 page)

There was no time to lose in implementing Jackson’s plan. From the beginning of 1942 the Middle East rapidly began heading towards a food disaster. In January 1942 the poor of Cairo stormed the bakeries and protested that the bakers were mixing sawdust with the bread flour.
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There were food riots in Tehran, Beirut and Damascus, and workers in British camps in Iran went on strike over lack of food.
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In January Lyttelton warned London that stocks of wheat from the poor harvest of 1941 were already running out. There were several months to be struggled through before the next harvest would again bring a flow of food into the cities. The British government took these warnings to heart and shipping was diverted to bring 350,000 tons of wheat into the area.
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Jackson’s friendship with General Sir Wilfred Lindsell, chief supply officer for the three military services in Cairo, now paid off as he was able to persuade Lindsell to cut the troops’ rations and release small quantities of food from army stores on a daily basis. Rommel was approaching Cairo across the western desert and there was a mounting sense of panic among the British community. As the British prepared to evacuate to Palestine, General Headquarters began to burn their files, covering Cairo in a pall of smoke.
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In the end, the military situation was saved by the second battle of El Alamein, which brought Rommel’s advance to a halt. The risk of civilian food riots in Cairo was averted by the MESC’s newly introduced food collection programme, which brought grain from that year’s harvest into the city three weeks earlier than usual.
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The Centre created new chains of interdependence within the region which relied more upon trucks and trains than scarce ships, although for the transport of some products the Centre used the ancient sailing dhows of Zanzibar, which enjoyed an Indian summer before they were eclipsed in the post-war era by modern shipping. In Egypt rice was grown in place of cotton and fed to the Indian troops stationed in North Africa. The surplus went to Ceylon to replace Burmese rice. The reduction of cotton-growing in Egypt led to a shortage of cottonseed oil, which was instead supplied by the Sudan.
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Australian and Canadian imports of wheat, upon which the Arabian Peninsula, Cyprus and
Palestine were dependent, were replaced by local imports of barley brought in by rail.
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Ironically, given our present-day image of Ethiopia as a country of famine, it supplied wheat and millet to southern Arabia, Eritrea and Somalia and to the famine-stricken inhabitants of Hadhramaut in the Aden Protectorate.
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This alternative supply network was supplemented by attempts to innovate in agriculture, although the level of agricultural under-development in the region meant that virtually all the efforts of the Centre had to be focused on improving civilian rather than military food supplies.
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Marshall Macduffie, an American employee of the Centre, was impressed by the ability of the British to rustle up experts whenever they were needed. The military allowed the Centre to analyse the professional qualifications of all the men and women serving in the area and, if they were likely to prove useful, re-assign them to work for the Centre. Businessmen, old colonial hands, experts in agronomy, would be tracked down and within a few days these men (and sometimes women) would appear and set off to share their knowledge with the farmers of the region.
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Irrigation schemes were set up in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, improved seed selection and the breeding and distribution of hybrid maize, good use of fertilizers, improvements in animal husbandry and mixed farming were all introduced under the auspices of the MESC.
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The army was enlisted in the campaign for agricultural production and soldiers helped to bring in the harvest in Iran. In one of the Centre’s most ambitious projects, troops were sent to the Sudan, southern Arabia, the Persian Gulf, upper Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tripolitania and Kenya to lay poisoned bait in the breeding grounds of locusts. Where they were unable to deal with the locusts while they were still land-bound, the RAF and the Soviet air force (who almost never co-operated with civilian schemes), sprayed the swarms of this destructive pest from the air. In this way the 1943–44 crops were saved from the rapacious insect.
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Industrial production was also stimulated. Steel was made in Turkey and Egypt, Palestine made canteens and clothing for the army.
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Every scrap of useful material was salvaged and recycled: tin from scrap metal, sulphuric acid from kerosene production for phosphate fertilizers, sodium sulphide from oil refineries for use in the manufacture of leather.
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One of the Centre’s most valuable schemes to save shipping
space was to convert the region’s trains from coal- to diesel-powered engines. Every request for any article, from spare parts for tractors to rubber tyres, was first scrutinized by an army of office workers and checked against availability elsewhere in the region and its priority compared with a host of other requirements for imports. Macduffie recalled an MESC meeting to review import licences. ‘Arrayed around a table were seven trim men in British Army uniforms. Before them were sheaves of papers … The meeting … resembled a tobacco auction held in low conversational tone. The papers were picked up and quickly passed down the line of uniforms with barely audible comments in the clipped rapid-fire speech that is characteristic for person-to-person communications among the British military.’ At the end of an hour Macduffie had not understood a word of what had been said, but ‘several hundred claims on Anglo-American resources, of vital importance to millions, had been processed’.
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The Centre succeeded in reducing the tonnage entering the region’s ports by more than half.
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A certain amount of smuggling still went on: Arab dhows took rice, fats, oils and tea from India to Iran and the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf. Iran was denied shipments of fats in 1942 because it was felt that this black market was supplying them with more than their fair share.
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Even though the area was flooded with British soldiers in Egypt, Soviets and Americans in Iran and the Gulf, and French in the Levant – all with money to spend – and there was a shortage of consumer goods amid a wartime boom in demand, uncontrolled hoarding and runaway inflation were held in check. For the most part the MESC managed to protect the entitlement to food of the poor and those on fixed wages. There was famine in Hadhramaut in the Aden Protectorate and in British Somaliland, and there were bread shortages, but the food situation for most inhabitants of the region remained stable, and possibly even improved. About a third of the Egyptian rice crop was used to enrich the diet of the Egyptian population and infant mortality declined in the region during the war, which is usually an indicator of satisfactory nutrition.
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The MESC was thus a success in that it maintained an important military region and sustained the military effort, while at the same time cutting down demands on shipping space and cushioning the indigenous population from the impact of war.

Officials within the MESC hoped that regional co-operation would continue after the war and the efforts of the Centre would provide a basis for the continued improvement of agriculture within the region. However, although the mechanization of farming continued in Iraq and Syria, and Egypt continued to show an interest in the improvement of its wheat and rice varieties, much of the work of the MESC in terms of improving fertilizers, seeds and livestock was abandoned for lack of resources. Without the pressure of war, western and local governments lost the political will to invest and co-operate.
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PROFITEERING IN EAST AFRICA

Although from the summer of 1941 the fighting was confined to the northernmost coastal strip of Africa, the hinterland of the British base in Egypt stretched all the way down the eastern side of Africa as far as South Africa. Throughout the war South Africa acted as a staging-post on the vital sea route around the Cape. It supplied the empire with men and gold, and the expansion of the country’s industrial and manufacturing base meant that it was able to produce weapons as well as manufactured goods. South African foodstuffs were transported to Egypt through East Africa, which acted as a secondary military base. Southern Rhodesia developed an iron and steel industry and the country’s industrial output tripled.
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Rhodesian and Kenyan farmers grew maize, sisal and pyrethrum daisies. But there was no Middle East Supply Centre set up here. Instead, the war exposed the rapacious nature of colonialism. White settler farmers used the conflict to demand guaranteed prices for their food crops, and in Northern and Southern Rhodesia the settlers used unwillingly conscripted African labour to work on their farms. By 1945 the white settlers had managed to entrench themselves both on the land and in the colonial administration. But some African producers also found ways of capitalizing upon the rising demand for foodstuffs, and their post-war desire to continue to build upon their prosperity set them on a collision course with the settlers.
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Meanwhile, measures to protect the entitlement to food of the poor and vulnerable were inadequate and in 1942 drought and crop failure resulted in localized famines in the region.

In 1939 the outlook of white settler farmers in East Africa was bleak. Every white farmer in Kenya was carrying an average debt of £2,000 and it was proving economically unviable for European settlers to establish themselves as farmers.
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When the leader of the Kenyan settler community, Major Cavendish-Bentinck, travelled to London at the beginning of the war he was told that the Ministry of Supply might be interested in their tea and sisal but their maize and coffee crop were of no interest to Britain.
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Nor did the government have any desire to prop up their failing enterprises. The situation was similar for white settler farmers in the Rhodesias. But when the war moved to Ethiopia in the summer of 1940 the settlers began to insist that their contribution to the war effort would be to increase agricultural production, and they began to pressurize their colonial governments to increase prices and provide them with loans. In Kenya their demands were resisted until November 1941, when the presence of British troops, Italian prisoners of war, Polish refugees, convalescent soldiers from North Africa and troops in training for Burma created a new and urgent demand for food. By 1943 the military were purchasing £1.5 million worth of meat, maize, vegetables, bacon and dairy products, virtually double what they had spent in 1941. Japan’s capture of south-east Asia created demand for Kenyan sisal for rope-making and pyrethrum daisies, which were the basis for insecticides. These two crops earned plantation owners more than double the amount of money earned by sales of food to the military.
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Sisal and pyrethrum were mainly sold to the United States, and so Kenyan farmers gained disproportionately good access to lend-lease farm machinery. Meanwhile, white settlers took advantage of the recruitment of colonial officers into the army to take over the colonial establishment, and created and ran production and supply committees, which enabled them to set the agricultural agenda within the colonies.
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They put government loans and lend-lease equipment to good use, breaking in new land with the assistance of Italian prisoners of war and conscripted African labour, and used their new-found wealth to pay off their debts.
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In Northern and Southern Rhodesia European farmers struggled to find Africans to work on their farms. The Africans preferred to look for work in the towns or the South African mines, and higher wartime food prices provided those on the reserves with the incentive to farm
for themselves rather than for a miserly wage. When the settlers pressed their governments to introduce African conscription for farm labourers they were told that conditions on the reserves were too precarious to justify further recruitment of men, and insisted that farmers must improve pay and conditions in order to compete for workers. The white farmers had no intention of improving working conditions on their farms and protested that the Africans were far more productive if they were working under European supervision and that African men should not be allowed to lie about on the reserves when the empire was under siege. The colonial administrators recognized these arguments as a call for exploitation dressed up as patriotism and resisted the settlers’ demands until 1942, when a drought threatened food production.
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The European farmers immediately capitalized on the administration’s fear of food shortages, to insist on the implementation of wartime conscription for farm labour. The Secretary of State was told that unless Africans were recruited to bring in the harvest almost half the colony would be threatened by famine. Moreover, there were the difficulties that would arise in trying to feed the white civilians, 10,000 RAF personnel taking part in the Empire Air Training Scheme, and 6,000 internees.
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Even before the Compulsory Native Labour Act was passed in August, the conscription process had begun. The Africans went unwillingly and it was widely reported that the approach of African messengers from the Native Department (who were used as recruiters) was ‘a signal for all able-bodied men to scatter to the four winds’.
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The farmers paid them only one shilling a day. The government paid the rest of their wages and supplied them with food. Altogether this provided white Rhodesian farmers with a subsidy worth £63,700.
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