On the Right - McGovern's Third Freedom.(George McGovern)(Review)

NEW YORK, JANUARY 23

George McGovern is at it again, endeavoring to mitigate human afflictions. He is better at mobilizing against natural afflictions than man-made ones. When he was the Democratic candidate for president in 1972, he did not do very much to encourage the anti-Communist coalition, but a great deal to describe the lot of human want. He is the son of a preacher, raised in the upper heartland of America, experiencing the Depression in which farmers were reintroduced to the long-lived paradox: They faced a starving community and could not make a living growing food.

Sen. McGovern serves as ambassador to the various United Nations food agencies and operates out of Rome. It is good news that the Bush administration has asked him to continue in service, because he is an incarnation of the human concern for people who are hungry and even die from hunger. And his dream, the gradual disappearance of hunger, is the theme of his new book, The Third Freedom. McGovern begins by reinterring Parson Thomas Malthus, the British economist who foretold starvation and pestilence on the grounds that birthrates were outstripping agricultural prowess.

We've known that wasn't so beginning about ten minutes after Malthus died; but McGovern gives us broad figures. When he ran for president, 35 percent of the world's people were hungry. By 1996, notwithstanding a 2 billion increase in the world's population, the percentage of the hungry was reduced to 17 percent. "The world now produces a quantity of grain that, if distributed evenly, would provide everyone with 3,500 calories per day."

Your face is rubbed deeply in the paradox. It was nicely expressed in a quizzical remark by Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil, whom McGovern quotes as saying sometime after the world war, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist."

Sen. McGovern, in his readable book, endorses a continuation and an expansion of existing ventures, with special emphasis on the U.N. ...