Conversation 493-007

Transcript (AI-Generated)

This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.

People in the field of agriculture, virtually all of us, you know, just are fantastic.

And I've seen, well, you're on the Monarch of Dune, Michigan State, places like that, Philippines.

There are all sorts of countries where you see these people working abroad, and they do a fantastic job.

And it's just something that gets

Nobody can complain about it very much.

Very good.

The decision on the hog had not been made by the Monday night, but a decision had been made to the horse during Calvaster.

Oh, I want to offer you money and everything, but you are a friend of the hogs, so I took this off my wall.

I thought you wouldn't mind getting a picture with that little dog.

That's what you see when you go to the University of Arkansas.

The hogs are beautiful.

And don't ever forget, I've been raising two and a half times more hogs than the next year's.

Don't ever forget the price.

Oh, I think it is.

Well, Mr. President, I'd be very happy to get out of here.

If you would like.

I will present this to the President on behalf of the National Court of Justice Council.

All right.

Let's put it out in the hall there.

I'll tell you what.

to come to that dinner tomorrow and see it.

It's a great picture.

I've heard of that.

Well, we were just saying that this is a whole deal of all of our foreign activities.

President.

You don't want to have a picture taken or a lot of pictures taken.

We're not going to follow you down.

Even though they don't have a jail date, please.

I'm pretty interested.

The drug name never caught my attention.

I don't think they think about anything.

The drug is sick.

Well, we're not going to follow you down, are we?

No, we're not going to follow you down.

Well, we're not going to follow you down, are we?

No, we're not going to follow you down.

Ha ha ha!

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I know.

That's right.

What a good morning.

Hmm.

What's that?

About how the government will help you?

I was saying, if I could open up the

four other programs.

The one that is just a grant of mine to those of us who have traveled greatly to abroad is what we've done in the field of agriculture.

You see these dedicated people.

And he was very generous in talking to the press.

And also when he received the Nobel Prize, he said that he accepted it for all the people working in this field.

But here we are in the United States.

We are by far the best producer of agriculture in the world.

the world.

If we, uh, if we, uh, if we, uh, if we, uh, if we, uh, if we, uh, if we, uh, if we, uh,

Northeast Brazil, Mexico, and so forth, they just gotta produce more, right?

And so, and they can.

And also, the interesting thing is, is they produce more than we like us.

We believe more.

I mean, the whole point is that it doesn't cut your agriculture exports at all, because it's people who live with us.

And here we are with the, I noticed, the amount of beef we have on the table now is, you know, it's gone up about 25% in 10 years.

I have a feeling, also, Mr. President,

I don't see some light.

It's very dim, but if one could change an agricultural production, move it, and therefore generate a whole series of changes in the internal economy, say, of a country such as India, they will never for any long period of time solve their whole agricultural or food production problem.

But if it can serve to get an industrialized, they do have a lot of natural resources.

I think that they, as Japan has so well demonstrated in the last 20 years, can become a very big purchaser of U.S. agricultural produce in 20 years.

And we can have peace and

Because at the present time, at the present time, they don't have anything to purchase it with.

Because they don't produce enough to take it back to Japan.

You know, it's a funny thing.

We think Japan, as it is, is a tiny little country in terms of land.

It has less air oil than California.

The other has enormously strong agriculture.

And the Japanese insist on having it.

Of course, the Japanese, as we all know, are one of the best farmers in the world, or at least were, and we still are.

We would rate them out.

The Chinese are regular.

Taiwan has become, frankly, an industrial society.

But my goodness, what they have done, what they have done, what they have done, they are just bringing all the bloody crops right here.

But the thing is that the contribution that's been made, the real contribution that's been made has not been in terms of our immense amounts of foreign aid.

That's fine, too.

We can give them foreign aid.

food for peace, you know, help people advance and all the rest.

But the more significant contribution is the technical contributions of people who have gone around the world teaching these people, helping them to develop their own agricultural times.

And then, as they develop that process,

they may learn to develop the same approach to other things.

And that means watching what you learn to run a business.

And I think that the US has contributed in many different ways to

development of these societies.

For example, the land grant colleges and universities have tremendous numbers of students from foreign countries that have studied here and gone back.

And then with the U.S. assistance program, whether it's through U.S. aid per se or through the university contract, there's been a continuing and

I think, Mr. President, there's one thing, and we were mentioning this just as we came in, that if there could be a way found to relieve some of the

people for a longer period of time in the same country area where they're working.

I'm talking about technically.

Our people?

Yes.

How long?

Five years in an area.

The agriculture, it's provinces, it's the culture, and some deal with the language.

If you work every two years, it's like the State Department.

Which is all right there, but you see for a month of this, they do not.

But certainly for everyone, I know this from personal experience.

And I have the feeling also, sir, that working, I've spent two and a half years in Mexico, but I'm still very proud of America.

Sure.

I have a lot of ties to the U.S. Navy.

Sure.

And, of course, in the military department, because for obvious and other reasons, maybe it is an environment to take them to war, but in technical assistance,

to become written about, he should know the country, his property, and other taxes.

I think that by here, Santa would be the minister who would get a good tale about how there are two...

If you talk to Santa about this, Santa, I believe, as I'm sure, since 19... since the day of the Civil War speech, we've talked about it there.

And this has been the continuing problem through all the years.

We've never been able to get to Congress.

Incidentally, I suppose.

Do you understand what that is?

Yes, I think you do.

I had a long time with that.

Oh, I should be able to see you.

Oh, sure.

This is sort of technical.

Thank you.

On this point, that's where the private foundations are.

But they are in Ford.

You probably know Dr. Malone, don't you?

since I think he was there for his fourth year.

They keep them there longer than we do in our aid program.

And I think they do a very effective job.

Of course, there's one thing that I think that we should point out.

Rockefeller and the Ford Foundation keep their people for a longer period of time.

But nevertheless, it doesn't matter once again.

What's your point?

Tell them next year or your successor has been appointed.

So the comfort is maybe formality.

So nevertheless...

Well, I guess the gist of it is that we have a reason to accomplish everything.

It must be qualified people, not the other people that point out that we've done too much of this.

Well, we've done too much of the case of the man down in Central America, the unforgotten

There was a case of a major director who went down there and bought into the ranch, and as soon as the supplies were coming down, it would be faster than anything else.

Yeah, we've got it.

Congressman Gross has watched some of these things.

There are some horrible examples.

But I have to say that most of them, most of them, I'm sure, in one area, it seems to me that the drama that is free of this is in the agriculture area.

The guys that I have seen, the men that I have seen,

that have worked, you know.

I've seen them from all these universities, Michigan State, Ohio State, Purdue, et cetera.

You see, what usually happens is that a country, someone, and this is a good idea, is a big university will adopt one particular country.

I don't lose any jewelry.

I think it's, I don't know, Wyoming?

That's right.

All right.

What you find is you do really find terrific people there.

Those people are there.

You know, they're really dedicated.

The kind of people that are bad that you'll find in these programs, frankly, some of the appointees that we make, the appointments that we make, that are just there, you know, they have a little part, a little broad, and they can be anything.

They can even be in the Peace Corps.

and other things, but what I mean is if you get a fellow who is really, like I said before, a scientist, or a doctor, or somebody that's a real professional, he wants to go there and do a job, and that's the kind of people we ought to really zero in on, rather than these professionals who go, I mean, not professionals in the sense of a particular task, but professionals in the sense of just trying to live off the country.

We dedicated a lot of money to agriculture and to education in Latin America.

It didn't work out well either way.

Two out of, two out of, I believe it was two out of seven or two out of five finished grammar school in Latin America.

A lot of high school dropouts because they don't,

They don't get to high school all too often.

We took people from the highlands in some of those countries down to the more fertile areas.

We were going to make farmers out of them.

We transplanted a lot of people.

They didn't say they didn't like the climate.

They didn't want to fish.

And so, in fact, they went to the highlands again.

Well, now, these are mistakes.

I think you agree with that.

What about the missionaries?

We should take a look at what the missionaries have been doing through the years, particularly before this aid program came to full throttle.

And how long did those people stay?

I'm sure they stayed more than two years.

Oh, they stayed a lifetime.

Yes, a lifetime or many years, at least.

And let me tell you a story, Columbia, a good one.

I was down here in Michigan State, and I was set up here at one of the colleges in Medellin, and I was a partner of the University in 1952 and 1953 in Southampton.

George LeRoy was involved at that time also.

In fact, I was there with him.

That program ran for about six, seven years.

And then we got off the ground, and they accepted through your account and a few other people.

We got a lot of students out there who got doctor's degrees or bachelor's degrees.

And then in fact, in 1962, the Columbia's came to see me because my association was out in Nebraska at that point.

And one was right in, but this time they wanted to start a bulking tie.

And you're familiar with that white program there and all the ones that your staff have done.

This was a different situation.

We didn't have a critical mass of local and federal people.

By the 60s, these young men had matured, they'd gotten older, they had more influence, they were more often.

And we had that nudges of people to work with.

And that program there now at the National University, it didn't take that.

is one of the best in the world.

And we've got, there are 40 people there at the University of Nebraska, all the faculty in the league now.

And what Mr.

Gross is talking about is not going to happen because the local people are so well involved.

And they're going to be able to, in a year or two or three, within the same time span, to offer a doctorate degree with their own resources, first time in Latin America.

You see, Mr.

Gross, I think that one of them, I would agree 100% with you on this.

that it's a long, difficult struggle to train a core of scientists and educators in an undeveloped country.

Take, for example, Mexico.

When I went to Mexico 27 years ago on a hospital drive, there wasn't one qualified agricultural research scientist in the whole republic.

It took us 18 years of struggling and training

using those hymns wherever we could get them, giving them research experience before they were sent out to the U.S., looking for the best, than after they had worked with us in our experiment stations, working with different crops and different kinds.

experience, we would pick the best and they would go out and study with the best degree.

Come back, we put them then to helping us train other younger Mexicans.

This process took from 1943 until 1962 when the whole responsibility was turned over then to a new institution, National Agricultural Research Institute.

of Mexico.

This was a new generation of scientists.

They are very good scientists.

Then the second step was taken to start a graduate school in agricultural sciences.

Again, it was painfully small.

It has just finished 10 years of operations now.

They are awarding a good master of science degree, and they are starting this year to award a doctorate.

And you said it was a great award.

Yes, it could be.

As a matter of fact, one of the, if you might like to know this, one of my best

battalion commanders of the Corps of Chicken.

I said, you want to call them that?

So I made an old food production plant in Pakistan.

I was one of the first young Mexican scientists that I had the privilege of working with.

And he lived and worked in Pakistan.

for four years and then two years in Beirut working with a number of other Arab countries.

He's just coming back now within a month to get a full extension program in Mexico.

So it takes time to bring all of these pieces together.

No easy solution.

Doctor, is FAO helping out pretty well on this?

FAO tends to help, but again, their mandate is

a very complicated one.

They operate only in an advisory capacity, and this leads a great deal to be desired in many of the developing countries.

I should go back now and point out one thing, especially about from here in the Middle East, North Africa, and for that matter, it was that way recently in Latin America, the first important thing.

Most of the people with an education, technical education, have no experience with the soil.

They have never been on the land.

They don't know farming.

And so if this is true in these countries,

And then if they go over there, just to illustrate the point, doesn't have an action program where they can walk with these young people and put in experiments, or production, or seed multiplication, because then they are just advising somebody whose old background is in theory, not in application.

You can get their advice, though.

One of the things that we attempt to do as part of our international research effort now in Mexico, we've had about 200 young people in the meat sciences alone in the last 10 years with us.

We give them a real indoctrination in this physical exercise also.

who are working with their hands as well as with their brain in all of the different aspects of experimentation to make the agricultural sciences function so that when they go back to their countries, they're in a position to do something, if they will,

Of course, we can't ask a question right here.

I can see you would agree with this, the list of questions.

If we didn't have FAO, we'd have to meet and agree it.

But in terms of .

.

. .

We are just buying some time.

If we can get the governments of the developing nations to commit reasonable allocations of, it's got to be good big sum of that, of their resources towards food.

We can hold the line for 20 to 25, maybe 30 years.

And if we haven't brought some hard-headed, realistic thinking to bear on the whole question of population growth by then, we'll have a kiosk in the world.

Vietnam will be just a distant rock in the bucket.

I am of the firm belief that people will not die by starvation.

badly, peacefully, and gracefully, when there are millions and hundreds of millions of them being built up, and our own way of life in the USA can't remain isolated.

But when this is happening in the rest of the world, we will have troubles in our own lives here, because when you pile up too many people, it's the first thing you'll see, it becomes a trap.

And it's like a cancer.

How do you find your conversations with foreign people?

All the intelligent people do, but they have such a terrible time, don't they?

I think that one of the great tragedies that I have seen in this whole field was the Yukon experience.

Are you going to come on back then, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

But the tragedy was that I was there about the time when this happened.

I used to see him quite frequently.

He's one of those nowadays that I have tremendous respect for.

He's a great character.

You know he has just had another heart attack.

He's being operated on in Cleveland.

Oh, he's here now.

He's in here.

And we should re-advise him.

You should give him a call.

In Cleveland.

Yes, sir.

Tell him once you find out what's happening.

Yes, sir.

Right now.

He's still got an open heart surgery.

I can walk him out.

Well, I was just here about 7, 8.

I thought he was probably operating on the day right now.

Well, go ahead.

Yes, sir.

When he had decided he was going to step down, he had his first heart attack.

And he wondered, and I sincerely believe, a very open election.

This was what he lived for.

He told me this.

He said, I want to see this happen.

Then I stepped aside.

And then all of the political campaigns started.

And he had to, of course, push this population very hard.

And there was an outbreak of smallpox in Karachi that started a very active campaign of vaccination in the school system.

And some irresponsible and vicious chemical on the extreme left started saying, this is really sterilizing all of our young daughters here.

Of course, he ignored it, but it built up to the use of this and that things went from bad to worse.

He wouldn't come out to face any of these issues, I don't think, at all.

But actually, this was the champion of trying to slow population growth in that whole vast area of Asia to levels where he could hope to give a meeting standard of living to well-being.

You know, India, we're just going to trip now, aren't we?

We pour a billion dollars a year from this country, 800 million to go pick them up, and use the tractor.

And they pour a lot in, and they make some profits, but as far as I ever can tell, it's just in their booth.

Until they start stopping their population growth.

China, of course, is facing it.

We don't know much about it yet.

But we heard about this, this is our nation.

They die like flies in the streets.

uh, Bengal, wherever you get your East Pakistan army.

But in China, it's worse.

They've got to stop.

They've got to cut it back.

We've got to educate them, John.

We've got to toughen it.

They've got to beat them already.

Well, they don't have enough.

They don't have much good land.

We've got to.

But don't agree.

We've got to toughen it.

Latin America was just in Caracas two weeks ago.

Yeah.

Half the people of Venezuela are 25 or younger.

We've got the worst situation in Mexico.

Mexico, yeah.

Well, they are half of the 120.

So this is our new president.

I say new, speaking now as far as international.

Sure, sure.

It's because of Liz.

He's very vigorous, but he was badly countered on his population.

What did he say?

In his early part of his campaign, he said, there's no population here.

What we need to do is to populate Mexico.

These vast areas, of course, they're all desert.

Notice.

And so he's got himself all done at the end of the branch of this one.

The situation is that they have a population growth now close to, right close to 3.9%.

That's what it's been for the last decade.

There are 50 million now.

This means that they have to have about a million jobs a year, a day.

This is thick.

I want you to be sure that he gets a copy of my population.

I'll get it to the message.

We had a rather strange message from the population here, so.

He drove down to the suspect in his hometown, and he drove in in a long evening in a rapid car late in the evening along the street.

Okay, pick him up.

Pick him up, and I didn't tell him a bit because he displayed a Mexican driver, a Mexican driver.

He's like, this is not before this all happened.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Well, thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Sir, are you saying you trust me?

I bought a nice, nice blue seat here.

We had it.

For, uh, for, uh, thanks to everybody.

Now we got a sponsor here.

Those men?

Uh, uh, yeah.

That's, that's, that's really funny.

They'll use that picture in Des Moines if there's something wrong with the register.

Thanks for that.

Well, there's something to do.

Well, we'll see you tomorrow, I guess.

It's fine to have you here.

Congratulations personally.

Thank you.