We calculate that the total nutritional production of the country for the fiscal year just closed was between seven per cent and nine per cent below the average of the three previous years, our nutritional surplus for export in those years being about the same amount as the shrinkage last year. Therefore the consumption and waste in food have been greatly reduced in every direction during the year. I am sure that the millions of our people, agricultural as well as urban, who have contributed to these results, should feel a very definite satisfaction that, in a year of universal food shortage in the Northern Hemisphere, all of these people joined together against Germany have come through into sight of the coming harvest not only with health and strength fully maintained, but with only temporary periods of hardship. The European Allies have been compelled to sacrifice more than our own people, but we have not failed to load every steamer since the delays of the storm months of last winter. Our contributions to this end could not have been accomplished without effort and sacrifice, and it is a matter for further satisfaction, that it had been accomplished voluntarily and individually. It is difficult to distinguish between various sections of our people--the homes, public eating places, food trades, urban or agricultural populations--in assessing credit for these results, but no one will deny the dominant part of the American woman. But the work of the Food Administration did not come to an end with the close of the war. Insistent cries for food came from the members of the defeated Teutonic alliance, as well as from the suffering Allied and neutral nations. To meet those demands, Mr. Hoover sailed for Europe to organize the food relief of the needy nations. The State Department, explaining his mission, stated that as the first measure of assistance to Belgium it was necessary to increase immediately the volume of foodstuffs formerly supplied, so as to physically rehabilitate this under-nourished population. The relief commission during the four years of war sent to the 10,000,000 people in the occupied area over 600 cargoes of food, comprising 120,000,000 bushels of breadstuffs and over 3,000,000,000 pounds of other foodstuffs besides 20,000,000 garments, the whole representing an expenditure of nearly $600,000,000. The support of the commission came from the Belgian, British, French and American governments, together with public charity. In addition to this some $350,000,000 worth of native produce was financed internally in Belgium by the relief organization. The second portion of Mr. Hoover’s mission was to organize and determine the need of foodstuffs to the liberated populations in Southern Europe--the Czecho-Slovaks, the Jugo-Slavs, and Serbians, Roumanians and others.