Message to the Congress Transmitting the President's Annual Report on Food for Peace.

To the Congress of the United States:

The United States in 1965 shipped $1.4 billion of food and fiber overseas under our Food For Peace program. This brings to $14.6 billion our food aid effort since the enactment of Public Law 480, the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954.

Food For Peace moved into its second decade continuing food aid programs that had proved so beneficial in the past, initiating imaginative new approaches to spur self-help, and facing an array of difficult challenges. The increasing pressure of world population growth was the most disturbing indicator in a year otherwise highlighted with promise in the war against hunger and malnutrition. Population growth of 2 percent a year--increasing to 3 percent in some of the underdeveloped countries--made it difficult to increase per capita food consumption. There was more food grown in 1965 than in 1964. But there were 64 million more mouths to feed.

In simplest terms, the task of bringing food and population into balance--while maintaining progress in health, education, and economic growth--is the most critical challenge many countries are facing today. It will probably remain their most urgent challenge in the immediate years ahead. The world's capacity to respond will dramatically affect the course which individuals and nations choose in confronting their problems and their neighbors in coming generations.

This is a world problem. The stakes are too large, the issues too complicated and too interbound with custom and commerce, to leave the entire solution to those countries that have supplied, or received, the most food assistance during the postwar era. The experience, the ideas, the skills, and the resources of every nation that would avoid calamity must be significantly brought to bear on the problem.

The United States Congress recognizes the moral and practical implications of hunger and malnutrition. Over the years its members have taken the lead in developing programs to prevent famine and to improve diets. The basic instrument Congress has used for this effort has been Public Law 480--the authorizing legislation for the Food For Peace program.

It is not easy to measure the achievements of a program with such multiple objectives as Food For Peace--aiding the needy, assisting economic development, supporting U.S. foreign policy, increasing trade, bolstering American agriculture. Yet as we look back on more than a decade of effort, the accomplishments are remarkable by any test.

Hundreds of millions of people have directly benefited from American foods. The lives which otherwise might have been lost-the grief which otherwise might have occurred--could have dwarfed the total casualties of all the wars during the period. I tend to think historians of future generations may well look back on this expression of America's compassion as a milestone in man's concern for his fellow man.

Food For Peace, however, is aimed at more than individual survival--and individual growth. It is directed toward national survival--and national growth. P.L. 480 has been an important resource in the growth process. With the day-to-day difficulties which countries face, we sometimes fail to recognize how far many of the nations we have aided have come in their development effort. An analysis of Food For Peace programing--which constitutes more than a third of our total economic assistance effort-is a good yardstick to measure such achievement. Frequently a country's development is directly reflected in its graduation from being a recipient of heavily subsidized food aid.

Consider, for example, the countries receiving our food and fiber for local currency in the first full year of operation a decade ago. There were 27 of them in mid-1956. Today, more than half have reached a point of economic development where they no longer require such aid. This group which had graduated from Title I programs, last year purchased more than $2 billion in agricultural commodities through commercial channels. This is more than triple their combined dollar purchase of a decade ago. Even excluding Britain, France and West Germany--today's big dollar customers who purchased only small amounts under P.L. 480 and left the program early--the gains are still impressive. Dollar sales of U.S. farm products to the other Title I graduates were well over a billion dollars last year-more than four times the amount in 1956.

Growing economic strength is also evident in that group of 13 countries receiving Title I food a decade ago which continued to buy U.S. farm commodities for local currency in FY 1965. They still face economic difficulties, but together these nations have more than doubled their dollar agricultural purchases from the United States over the ten-year period.

Global generalizations are difficult. But the broad pattern clearly shows substantial progress.

Indeed, the problems today are in many ways more serious than those facing the Congress when it enacted this law. The critical food shortage in India, though aggravated by drought, should be read as a warning that a crisis in food and population trends is already at the world's doorstep. The Food for Freedom legislation which I have proposed to Congress faces up to these problems. It takes into account the experience and lessons of P.L. 480, along with the changing conditions in food needs and supplies. It recognizes that the program will be judged in the long run by its success in encouraging self-help programs and attitudes in the recipient countries.

We have progressed a great deal during the past decade. We now know that food assistance can:

--make an important contribution to economic development

--serve the highest objectives of U.S. foreign policy

--help American agriculture

--strengthen the habit of international cooperation

--help to dispel Malthusian fears which have historically haunted mankind.

By any standards, this nation can be proud of its Food For Peace program. It gives me pleasure to submit to the Congress the annual report on the 1965 activities carried on under Public Law 480, 83rd Congress, as amended.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

The White House

June 30, 1966