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192 Chapter 9 Helping Developing Countries Relieving Hunger The NCRLC’s involvement in international rural life started in response to World War II, but the Conference’s primary foreign concern soon became developing countries. As Christians looking at the international arena, the Conference saw these countries as being the most in need of charity. The NCRLC helped them deal with the issues of hunger, self-help projects, land reform, and the overall structure of international economics. The Conference’s help for developing countries started during the Ligutti years and continued through the end of the twentieth century. The NCRLC’s efforts to relieve hunger in the world started during World War II with aid to the battle-torn countries. In a major statement issued in 1943, the Conference predicted: “The first major task [after the war] will be to rush food to the starving people of war-stricken areas.” Once the war was over, it noted that the average European adult consumed only 1,300 calories a day, compared to 4,000 for the average American. As a result , the average European adult weighed 27 to 30 pounds less than before the war. The situation called for the immediate shipment of the large American grain surpluses to Europe. Ligutti wrote: “Europe needs the grain now; USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] has it to spare now; USDA must jack up its allocations soon to the new, Truman-approved, 570 million bushel export goal.”1 The NCRLC joined in a number of postwar relief programs—some of which have continued up to the present. The Conference had constant close relations with War Relief Services—NCWC, which after 1955 was called Catholic Relief Services. Originally, the NCRLC cooperated with 1. NCRLC, Rural Life in a Peaceful World (Des Moines, Iowa: National Catholic Rural Life Conference , 1944), in “General Publications, 1944–46,” NCRLC 5-1, 19; “This Is Your News Letter,” Christian Farmer 1 (December 1947): 1; Paul A. Sacco, “Europe’s Food Needs,” ibid. (February 1948): 1–2. Helping Developing Countries 193 War Relief Services in food programs for Europe and in later years joined in land settlement and hybrid corn projects as well.2 In 1945, the NCRLC began to cooperate in the Heifer Project, a program started during the war years by the Church of the Brethren, which shipped live cattle to needy families overseas. The Conference appointed the Reverend H. J. Miller, diocesan director from Fort Wayne, Indiana, director of its participation in the project. He solicited “money, cattle, and sea-going cowboys from among Catholics in all parts of the United States.” The program was soon expanded to include other farm animals and food and machinery. City people as well as farmers were urged to contribute money for the purchase of livestock to be sent overseas. One requirement for the receipt of an animal was that its first offspring had to be passed on to another needy family. NCRLC participation grew so much that by 1954 it had two members on the Heifer Project’s board. The project also increased the amount of its aid: in 1955, it distributed 895 head of cattle, 231 goats, 150 pigs, 62,550 chicks, and 63,480 hatching eggs. By 1957, the Heifer Project had given about $3 million in aid, about $1 million of it to needy Catholics. In 1960, the NCRLC, still recovering from its financial crisis, dropped its participation in the Heifer Project, but it rejoined in 1970, attracted by the project’s ecumenical character and its services to many poor Catholics in developing countries. The Conference continued its representation on the board of the organization renamed Heifer International into the new millennium, by which time it had provided livestock and training to more than 4 million families around the world.3 The NCRLC also participated in the Christian Rural Overseas Program (CROP), which was founded in 1948 by the NCRLC (as official representative of NCWC War Relief Services), Church World Services of the Division of Overseas Ministries of the National Council of Churches, and Lutheran World Relief to distribute nutritional food to underdeveloped countries. The Conference, of course, urged its members to contribute to the program , and by 1950, 2,100 priests in sixty dioceses were doing so, with $1 million a year collected through Catholic auspices. CROP was much larger 2. Yzermans, The People I Love, 128–29. 3. Witte, Twenty-five Years, 128–29; “Heifer Project,” Feet in the Furrow 3 (December 1954): 10; “Heifer Project...

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