851.5018/4–847
The French Embassy to the Department of State
Aide-Mémoire
On instructions from the French Government, the French Embassy sent to the Department of State on March 31, 1947,1 a note by which it called its attention to the very precarious situation of the supplying of cereals to France and to the urgent need of obtaining a quick and substantial increase in American shipments, since the United States is the only source of imports on which France can count at the present time.
The reports which have reached the Embassy very recently confirm the gravity of this situation. In spite of the saving realized in North [Page 697] Africa, thanks to the use of a high percentage of barley, and in spite of the energetic measures taken in Metropolitan France to speed receipts, the supplying of flour is already beginning to cause great difficulties, especially in the south of France. For that reason, it has been necessary to draw on the limited stocks of Paris and Lille to assure the supplying of Marseilles and Nice.
These disruptions, which will increase and become more extensive in the course of the coming weeks, are due to several causes: the decrease in receipts in proportion to the resumption of agricultural work; the impossibility, owing to the lessening of the reserve supplies, of assuring the distribution of the available resources throughout the country; and the insufficiency of imports.
It is to be expected that these difficulties will increase considerably at the beginning of May, when shipments within the country will be completely halted as a result of the progressive exhaustion of the supplies.
This situation, the gravity of which was not equaled even in the hardest years of the occupation, imposes upon the French Government, in spite of the weighty political consequences which such a measure involves, the obligation of reducing the bread ration, beginning May 1, to a level which it has never before reached.
This decision, however, will not suffice to solve the problem. It is, in addition, indispensable that France receive, from now until May 31, large supplementary deliveries, and that it receive advance shipment of its June quota if it is desired to prevent, in the great urban centers, the mining areas and other regions, the occurrence of interruptions in the supplying of a ration which has already been diminished and which concerns a type of bread which includes an abnormal proportion of corn.
The French Government has the firm hope that, under these grave circumstances, the Government of the United States will be so good as to lend it its effective and immediate assistance.
- Not printed.↩