The Potters Herald

Comment On World Events

By the time winter begins in earnest, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund will have enough milk available for one cupful a day for each of the 4,000,000 children under its program in 12 European countries, the UNICEF News reports.

Scarcely less important, there will be enough cod-liver and shark-liver oil for a daily dose, vitamin-full, for each and all. This milk and fish oil, along with bread, potatoes, fruits and the like which their governments are contributing toward the daily supplementary meal, should go far toward getting these children through the winter in good shape, nutritionally speaking.

So far, the fund has shipped 112,000,000 pounds of milk and has more on the way. Much the largest part is dry skim milk, a product high in protein and mineral value yet relatively inexpensive. It comes mainly from the United States, the largest producer of this product.

The equivalent of well over 5,000,000 pounds of fish-liver oil, most of it from cod, has been shipped, or enough to carry the program into spring. This oil has come from Iceland, Newfoundland and Norway, and as in the case of milk, the fund is buying a large part of the world's exportable surplus.

In addition, UNICEF has also shipped large quantities of oleomargarine and lard, and has contracted for 9,000,000 pounds for shipment in the next few months. All the lard is coming from the United States; the oleomargarine from the U. S., Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands. And, good news for young appetites, the fund is shipping a half-million pounds of peanut butter from Australia, in addition to that already sent.

Large quantities of meat and fish have been shipped and more is on the way. Two and one half million pounds of raw cotton, provided by UNICEF and purchased in this country, are on hand in the receiving countries to be made into cloth for clothing, diapers and sheets.

The present situation, it is good to know, shows a great improvement over that prevailing last winter, when the fund's work was just getting started. Not only is UNICEF in a better position to help the children, but there is, generally speaking, more food all around, because of Europe's satisfactory grain harvests. The outlook, however, is still far from favorable. The countries in which the fund is operating remain short of animal proteins, badly needed by the children to make up for long time deficiencies in their diet.

UNICEF, moreover, has never reached more than a fraction of the children in need of assistance. The European countries in which the fund is operating feeding programs are Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia.