The hunger in East Pakistan has always been a guessing game. Numbers have fluctuated by the million. Accurate figures are now available from an unpublished United Nations report. Seventeen million Pakistanis are at the moment facing critical shortages of food. Unless a mammoth relief operation is finally mounted (and little has yet been achieved) another 23 million will be starving by Christmas. The report is invaluable because it is the only analysis that has yet been made of the precise extent of starvation and food supplies throughout East Bengal since the civil war began last spring. It was prepared for Paul Marc Henri, the head of the United Nations Relief Operation in Dacca, by USAID officials in East Bengal. Its conclusions will be discussed at a meeting of the UN’s Inter-Agency Group after Henri has flown to Geneva next Wednesday.

In many respects the conclusions (which are revealed here for the first time) are less pessimistic than had been feared. The surveyors believe that there is, and need be, no disastrous overall shortage of food in East Bengal, and certainly no such famine as in 1943 when 1,500,000 died. The country has a normal grain deficit of two million tons and many observers consider that this year that may well double. Such a shortage can in theory be met: there are already large stores of wheat from the surplus granaries of the West stockpiled in Chittagong. But as the report makes clear, the difficulty is in distributing them; if there is famine in East Bengal this winter it will be because the infrastructure of the country has totally collapsed, not because no food is near at hand.

The report divides the country into 59 areas, averaging about 1.2 million people and 1,000 square miles in each. They found that 14 of these areas were likely to face critical food shortages during the autumn, 19 could well yet become critical, and 26 should, with luck, be adequately supplied. One of the difficulties that all the relief operations are facing is that in theory the Government will allow them to work only on post-cyclone relief projects that were begun before the spring civil war. Officially they are not allowed to give relief to those affected by the war rather than by the floods. In the North there was no flooding and it is there, as a result, that starvation is likely to increase - because so far the Pakistan Government has forbidden access, except to the permanent missionary bodies.

Victor Powell, the Chairman of the Consortium of British relief charities, who returned from Dacca this week, considers that one of the other major problems is that there simply is not enough money for people to buy rice. He reckons that only 20-30% of the country’s industry is now functioning, and a whole new class of unemployed is living off its last savings, unable to buy what food there is. The normal commercial network of food distribution has therefore broken down : there is no incentive for merchants 0r indeed for peasant proprietors; both are now hoarding their crops. Powell thinks that the most effective way of overcoming food shortages would be just to restore the normal commercial incentives. Food vouchers should be distributed in starvation areas, he says.

Instead the report recommends various contingency transport plans, hopefully designed to fit the specific requirements of various areas. For example, in Comilla Sadar, a region which has a traditional food deficit, the first two crops were very small this year and the usual access routes are badly disrupted. The food deficit is normally made up by merchants importing supplies to the area; this year that has not happened and prices are now up to 43 rupees a maund, which is not as high as in some areas (Faridpur 50 rupees) but is about 30% more expensive than usual. The UN investigators reckon that the area needs about 4,000 tons of grain a month and recommend various combinations of road and river transport to deliver them.

Nevertheless, as a plan for action rather than as an analysis of the present crisis, the report is seriously limited and those British aid officials who have seen it are shocked by the vagueness of its recommendations. “If we had had their resources, we should have been able to put forward far more concrete proposals” says one. It is further limited by its own assumptions, the most basic of which is that “none of the participants in the current civil strife will actively pursue a policy of preventing the transportation and distribution of food to the people.” As the writers admit, “without that assumption, the report is virtually meaningless.”

Not a few would therefore say that the report does indeed render itself quite meaningless. There are still reports from East Bengal of how the Government and army commandeer food trucks and boats and use hunger as a political weapon. And at the same time many Bangladesh intellectuals (both inside and outside the country) argue with, as Victor Powell says, total cynicism, that nothing should be done to prevent famine and thus end of the Yahya Khan regime.

So far United Nations action has been quite inadequate and 10,000 refugees are not only entering India every week, they are also now fleeing to Burma. The report speaks of UNICEF plans for child feeding programmes in six districts. In fact these have begun in only two areas : Dacca and Chittagong. Indeed, independent charities seem to have been more marginally successful to date. The Consortium of British charities (War on Want, Oxfam, Christian Aid) have a team with 38 tractors in the Noakhali area, and Save the Children last week began a mother-child care programme.

However in the past two weeks, the UN operation has received 100 five ton trucks from Japan and 200 more are now on their way from the US army in Germany. It will be a proof of the report’s basic assumption that everyone, but everyone, wants the food to be distributed and eaten by the hungry if the bridges are now rebuilt.