Shall the Brewing of Grain Be Prohibited?

SHALL the Federal government now prevent the use of grains in the manufacture of spirituous liquors?

This question is fairly before the country, and two classes of people are actively interested: first, those who would seize upon present conditions as favorable for the advancement of prohibition; second, those who, independently of moral considerations, think of such a measure as a war necessity for conserving the food-supply under circumstances which have produced a shortage and which are none too favorable for increased production. It is wholly from the point of view of the latter that the present article has been prepared.

Because figures are such treacherous factors in all discussion, and because statements so conflicting have been published, it may be well to remark in advance that all estimates of the grainsupply are based upon the latest reports of the International Agricultural Society of Rome, the highest existing authority on world-production. As the yields given are for cleaned wheat or for flour in terms of wheat, they are five to ten per cent lower for that particular grain than are other figures frequently published.

The figures giving the amount of grain consumed in the manufacture of liquors are taken from an unsigned article on ‘Agriculture and the Liquor Industry’ appearing in the Year Book of the United States Brewers’ Association for 1914. Inasmuch as the purpose of the article in question was to show how important to farmers is this form of consumption, the figures may be assumed to be authentic, while the source of information cannot be questioned. It is but fair to say, however, that the article deals with the year 1913, when the production of fermented liquors amounted to 65,250,000 barrels, since which time it has declined to something less than 60,000,000 for each of the last two years. The writer knows of no sources of information that are safer or fairer for all the interests concerned than these two standard publications.

The world’s wheat-supply outside the territory controlled by the Central Powers, which no longer report crop yields, is, by any method of calculation, entirely unsatisfactory, although the exact condition of affairs is extremely difficult to set forth in figures. The year 1915 produced bumper grain crops all over the world. Measured against that year, the wheat crop of last season is some 400,000,000 bushels short, and an actual shortage exists in every country in the world. The falling off of production in Argentina from 172,000,000 bushels to 77,000,000 fully accounts for the embargo which that country has placed on the export of the great bread grain. Canada’s wheat crop of last season, as measured against the year before, shows a falling off of nearly one half, and the wheat crop of the United States drops from over 1,000,000,000 bushels to only a little over 600,000,000.

This bad showing is largely the result of comparing extremes, for while the yield of 1915 was decidedly high, that of last year was abnormally low. When last, season’s crop is compared with the average for the five years before the war, it is found to be fully 200,000,000 bushels short — an illustration of the fact that variations as high as twenty-five per cent may be due to season alone. In France, however, the yield dropped off over twentynine per cent for the high year 1915, and over thirty-two per cent for last year.

These declines may well cause alarm, for they cannot easily be recovered in countries engaged actively in war, with a large proportion of the population withdrawn from industry, especially where the usual supply of fertilizers is unobtainable, either because of lack of transportation or because of shortage in materials. The world’s wheatsupply, therefore, must be written down as permanently unsatisfactory during and for a considerable period after the war, except as America may be able notably to increase her production. However, that such increase is extremely doubtful is evident when we remember that Canada, with a population not greater than that of our largest state, has sent nearly 400,000 soldiers across the water, and that the supply of farm-hands in the States was estimated as being 2,000,000 below the normal even before the outbreak of the war.

Over ninety per cent of all the corn of the world is produced in the United States. The normal yield is about 2,750,000,000 bushels; and although last season’s crop was something like 200,000,000 bushels short, the shortage was greatly eased off by the exceptional crop of the year before, but not sufficiently to prevent eighty-cent corn early in the season. Beside amounts such as these for the two great cereals, the yield of all other grain crops is insignificant and for the present purpose may be neglected, it being sufficient to point out that the total grain crop of the world, not including oats or rice, is about 8,000,000,000 bushels, of which nearly one half is produced in the United States; and if Canada be included, a full half of the grain of the world is grown in America.

How much, now, of our grain crop is consumed in the manufacture of liquors, and therefore wasted from the standpoint of food, either for man or beast, except for the slight amount of stock-food produced as a by-product of brewing?

The Year Book cited gives the consumption in the form of dollars, based upon the average farm-values as determined by the United States Department of Agriculture. Computing backward from these prices for the period in question, the consumption in bushels is as follows: —;

Here are nearly 156,000,000 bushels of grain removed from the food-supply. Prodigious as these figures are, and while they cover fifty-eight per cent of all the barley raised in the United States and over seventeen per cent of all the rye produced, they account for less than two per cent of the corn crop and only one eighth of one per cent of the wheat. Does the use of this amount of grain for brewing, therefore, mean a consumption sufficiently serious to attract attention from an economic point of view?

Measured against the tremendous total of the grain crops of the United States, this amount seems insignificant. But in cases of this kind it is not totals but margins that must be considered. In the budget of a big business, for example, any single item seems negligible when compared with the total; but that total is made up of many items, most of which are fixed charges against the business, leaving but little free money for open use. Just so with food-products. The millions of mouths that must be fed and the millions more that are coming on constitute a fixed charge against our food-supply that will leave at any one time only a small free margin that may be devoted to other purposes with any degree of safety. Let us, therefore, consider that margin.

Mr. Lubin, the American representative in the International Institute of Agriculture already mentioned, estimates that the world is short about 130,000,000 bushels of grain, again exclusive of the supply of the Central Powers. Now it is this small shortage that raises the price and makes all the trouble, for it is this that constitutes the difference between abundance and scarcity, between comfort and distress, between safety and danger. This margin, therefore, needs attention.

We of the United States have the acres, but it is doubtful if we have the labor, to overcome this shortage and at the same time to provide the excess necessary to meet the toll of the submarines, remembering that when one of our projected 3000-ton ships loaded with grain goes down, it takes with it 100,000 bushels. There would seem to be a better way out of the difficulty.

Reference to the table will show that this world-shortage of 120,000,000 bushels of grain is more than covered by the amounts consumed in the manufacture of liquors in the United States alone. Does not this afford the most ready means of recovering that shortage with both speed and certainty? Is it wise, is it statesmanlike, to continue to consume grain in this way, in the face of a real shortage of food, when even slight margins may constitute all the difference between success and failure in the great struggle that is upon us? The war will turn, not upon the fact that some 39,000,000 men are under arms, but upon some slight advantage that one side may gain over the other; and no advantage is more important than a safe margin of food.

Another reference to the table will serve to show that it is the fermented rather than the distilled liquors that call for the greatest consumption of grain in the liquor business. That is to say, about 120,000,000 bushels — or approximately the world-shortage — are used for fermented liquors, against some 35,000,000 bushels, practically none of which is wheat, used for distillation.

Distilled liquors are needed in the industries, and corn is their cheapest source. Under the pinch of necessity this need could be supplied by potatoes, but their use would involve new distilleries in new locations, besides raising ugly problems of transportation. Corn is the cheapest of all sources of alcohol so long as corn-lands can meet the demand. When they can no longer do it, we can turn to potatoes. Till then, or till some new emergency arises, the use of grain for distilled liquors probably need not be disturbed, although regulations governing consumption might easily become necessary.

But it is a different matter when we consider fermented liquors. Here are 120,000,000 bushels of grain, partly wheat, all destroyed so far as foodvalues go, except for minor by-products for the feed lot. This is approximately the amount of the world’s shortage, and in that sense it is large and exceedingly significant.

To transport the grain now used for fermented liquor in the United States alone would require the entire fleet of a thousand wooden ships such as are now contemplated for the war-trade. This 120,000,000 bushels of grain is the equivalent of over half the wheat crop of France or of Canada, and it is twice that of England. It represents the entire grain food of over 15,000,000 people, and that is no negligible amount. It represents in the form of meat no less than 750,000,000 pounds, or the carcasses of more than a million of the heaviest beeves. With people starving abroad, with large sections of Europe desolate, and with food-riots beginning in this country as a result of high prices, there can be but one answer to the question whether this wastage shall continue.

There is an incidental phase of the same question. One of our greatest needs, present and prospective, is labor — men to work the land; men to fill the ranks of the non-productive armies; men to equip the manufacturing industries; men to extend and operate the railroads suddenly called upon to carry unaccustomed burdens; men to keep the mines running as they never ran before; men to do all the thousand and one necessary things involved in war — the successful prosecution of hostilities, the preservation of society while war endures, and the mighty labor of restoration afterward.

Now it so happens that the same number of the Brewers’ Year Book contains an article on ‘The Economic Importance of the Liquor Business,’ in which it is shown that this business affords direct employment to some 500,000 men, and indirectly to as many more. To quote the final sentence, ‘Thus we may reckon on a total of considerably over a million who are dependent for wages upon the manufacture and sale of liquor. If their dependents are considered, a grand total of about four million persons is involved.’

Here it is frankly stated, as an economic asset, that practically one person out of every twenty-five in the United States is devoted to the liquor business and dependent upon it for support. Can we afford at any time, much less now, so heavy a draft from an unproductive industry, particularly one that subsists by the destruction of necessary food?

Here again the count is chiefly against the fermented liquors, which consume the bulk, not only of the grain, but also of the labor involved both in manufacture and in trade. Clearly it is the fermented liquor that economic necessity will first attack.

A principal point made in the article first cited from the Brewers’ Year Book is that the liquor business consumes grain equal in value to the total crops grown in the states of Maine, Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming combined. Rhode Island might have been added, still leaving a balance of some seven or eight millions of dollars to be accounted for. Under present conditions this is surely no sustaining argument. Here is the entire crop output of eight states, great and little, consumed in ways other than for food. More than four fifths of this consumption serves no useful purpose in the arts or sciences, and at the best caters to an appetite that takes bread from children and support from wives and mothers by the thousands.

Wholly aside from all considerations of morals, the weakening effect of liquor upon thousands of its users, or the economic wreckage resulting from its use, the fact is that there is a world-shortage in grain approximately equal to the amount used for brewing. If possible, this shortage must be made good at once as a matter of safety, either by increased production or by the saving of waste. Whether we can do this by production is uncertain. The control of submarines is problematical. The one ready and certain means of practical restoration is the prohibiting of the use of grain for purposes not contributing to the food-supply or necessary in the industries. No other course is wise. To follow any other is to gamble with one of the few margins of safety, and it is an old adage that he who gambles with Death loses.

The United States can undertake no more statesmanlike policy at this time than deliberately to set about the task of accumulating 1,000,000,000 bushels of grain reserve against a possible succession of bad seasons. In this connection it must be remembered that the harvests of the year before last were exceptional in all the countries of the earth; had it been otherwise, the world would be hungry now, as all western Europe is coming to be. And if, in the providence of God or the shortage of labor, we should have two lean years in succession, we all, even in America, may come very near the hunger point, near enough to lead to dangerous riots on the part of those who first feel the pinch — riots of a kind that have destroyed more governments than one. Let us, therefore, with the least possible delay, convert a shortage into a surplus, and until this is done, let all forms of grain wastage be stopped as soon and as completely as possible.

Vegetables and fruits are perishable, and difficult and costly of transportation. Meats are expensive at best. It is the grains that are cheap, that keep indefinitely, and that are easily transported by land or sea. Under the conditions that now confront the United States, the grain-foods have a peculiar value; they may even turn the tide of war. Their use for fermented liquors is the one great waste that can be prevented without the disturbance of any essential public interest. Not to prevent it is to pursue a course little short of criminal negligence.