Fifty Cents of CARE

A group of students will sit in front of the Coop tomorrow and Thursday soliciting fifty-cent pieces from passersby. Each person who gives will be responsible for shifting fourteen pounds of surplus food from the nation's overcrowded storerooms to foreign stomachs. For the Foreign Operations Administration has made a special agreement with CARE which will dent the nation's vast food reserve, improving foreign relations as well as cutting a food storage budget which is four times the cost of running Congress.

CARE has offered to act as FOA's agent in distributing two and a half million 14 pound packages by next January 21. The government will supply and package food from its surplus; CARE will merely deliver it with funds gathered through fifty-cent and dollar contributions from citizens. For every dollar given here some needy family abroad will receive enough food to sustain it for a month.

Continuing CARE's personal touch--the recipient of every package will learn the name and address of his American benefactor--the arrangement will tend to eliminate the suspicion and resentment that sometimes surround handouts by foreign governments.

If the plan works on a limited scale this winter, the FOA has virtually guaranteed to continue and expand it to a point where it can begin to have a real effect on the surplus problem. If the program expands, it can draw on an American reserve far exceeding what could be needed in any forsecable emergency--large enough to feed Chicago's population for forty-two years. At the same time, it delivers food where it will do the most good without the "dumping" that might dislocate a country's economy.

The FOA plan is a positive step toward resolving one of the nation's most expensive wastes in a way that helps U.S. prestige abroad. When students pass through the Square, intent on their own Christmas shopping, they should not forget that one fifty-cent piece can buy far more than fourteen pounds of international good will.