Milton Freidman is said to have defined economics in its simplest form with the expression, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Recent energy price increases have raised the production cost of food, making that lunch even more expensive. In addition, high energy prices have created incentives for several countries to turn directly to agriculture as a source of energy, extracting alcohol from several crops, including sugar cane and corn. Continued political instability in the Middle East intensifies this interest in domestic alternatives to oil. But most countries do not have the agricultural ability to produce a significant portion of liquidfuel needs and still provide adequate food supplies. This raises concern about how agricultural resources should be used. The resulting food/fuel choice depends on a unique set of conditions in each country.

The United States has a key role to play in both energy and food matters. The U.S. consumes almost a third of all petroleum produced in the world, imports almost 50 per cent of its domestic petroleum needs, and is the major exporter of agricultural products. The sheer magnitude of both the U.S.'demand for liquid fuels and its share of world agricultural trade makes U.S. policy choices on the food/fuel interface of critical importance domestically and in other areas as well.

One could argue that at the dawn of the 1980s Japan had reached a higher level of civilization than any mass society on earth. Most Japanese could aspire to higher education and a well-paying job, obtain medical, welfare, and pension benefits, live in comfort and safety, and still expect the freedom to write and talk more or less as they pleased. Inbred social constraints, the perpetual search for a near-mythical “consensus,” not to mention the legendary “homogeneity” of Japanese society— all no doubt placed inhibitions on the Japanese. But these were hardly comparable to the political terror, abject poverty, and economic and social inequities prevalent in one form or another* jn many other industrial nations.

The Japanese themselves, though bitterly critical of their own shortcomings and failures wherever they perceive them, continue to believe they can do no better than retain the system and set of rulers under which they have lived for the past generation. The voters on June 22 gave the deeply conservative Liberal-Democratic party (LDP) its greatest leverage in a decade. In elections for all members of the powerful lower house and half the upper house, the LDP increased its slim majorities so that it now controls every key committee and can all but ignore the pro forma objections raised by the distant second-ranking Japanese Socialist party, which barely managed to hold its own.

Lu Hsui-lien, thirty six, holds advanced law degrees from the University of Illinois and Harvard. She not only practiced law but was also, until recently, a writer and editor, a dedicated campaigner for human rights in general and women's rights in particular, and a candidate for the Yuan,'Taiwan's national legislative assembly. Lu now spends her days in a cramped and musty cell, her spirit broken by sixty days of grueling interro gation during which not even her family knew of her whereabouts. Threatened with the murder of family and friends as well as her own execution, she ultimately signed a prefabricated confession of sedition.

The threat to murder members of her family was not one that Lu could afford to dismiss lightly. One of her co-defendants, Lin Yi hsuing, thirty nine, a provincial assemblyman who had studied law at Berkeley, had lost his mother and his seven-year-old twin daughters, all three stabbed to death by a nameless nighttime intruder while his interrogation was under way. When Lin continued uncooperative, his interrogators reminded him that he had still another daughter and a wife.

In May, 1980, when the Geneva meeting on Humani tarian Assistance and Relief to the Kampuchean People took place and funds to continue aid were pledged, the food distribution system inside Kampuchea was a sham bles. Rice-laden ships were backed up in the harbors at Kampong Som and Pnompenh, where warehouses were full. Rice, unlike rice seed, was not reaching the villages.

There was rare consensus on this point, even among those international organizations and voluntary agencies that had been presenting a generally positive pic ture of developments inside Kampuchea. Relief work ers in Pnompenh took the unprecedented step of jointly warning the Heng Samrin regime that it could not count on continued international aid unless distribu tion improved. Interviews with Khmer peasants treking on foot, by bicycle, and oxcart to the Thai border from several provinces in west and northwest Kampuchea confirmed that food distribution was grossly inadequate if it existed at all. Heng Samrin's own village commit tees, with no rice to give peasants and farmers, were issuing passes to the Thai border that were being hon ored by the Vietnamese soldiers who control much of the access to the relief “land bridge” at Nong Chan.