The New Age – February 15, 1934 – No.: 2162 – Vol. LIV. – Pages 185
“A Mad World.”
“Is it not odd that, although there are millions of people in civilised lands who are going about hungry and cold and shabby because they have not the money with which to buy food and clothes, farmers (in some parts of the world should be burning wheat and sowing less than half the cotton they used to sow in the cotton belt?
“Is it not strange that in Europe hundreds of thousands of poor people have to drink sham coffee made out of straw and cheap flavouring because they cannot afford to buy fresh coffee, while in Brazil, where the coffee comes from, they are burning coffee in the railway engines, and the Government of Brazil has given orders that no new coffee trees must be planted for the next three years?
“Is it not queer that in Germany hundreds of thousands of men and women are “tightening their belt” because they have not enough money to buy the beef that used to come in from Denmark, while the other day in Denmark 250,000 cows and bulls were killed and their carcasses burned because the farmers of Denmark can no longer sell at a profit to Germany?
“In Holland a short while ago 100,000 baby pigs were killed and burned. In Portugal they have poured the wine away into the gutters. In Spain, in many orchards, fruit has been allowed to fall and rot under the trees. Rubber has oozed from the trees in Malaya, in the Dutch East Indies, and in South America, but the workmen have not been allowed to gather it. In the U.S.A. soldiers have driven workers and merchants from the oilfields so that they shall not draw up the oil from under the earth. Miles of sugar canes from the West Indies have wasted their sweetness on the plantations, where no man has bene allowed to pick them. Thousands of jute plants in India have been left standing. Tons of dead fish have been thrown back into the seas by fishermen who caught them.” - (From The Modern World). Quoted in The new Economics, 10/11/33.