Talk:Commission for Relief in Belgium

Article name
There's probably a definitive name for the Belgian relief organization, but it seems to have several different names in wikipedia - help apppreciatedGraemeLeggett (talk) 17:17, 14 March 2009 (UTC)


 * There is -- it's "Commission for Relief in Belgium." There were numerous "Committee for Belgian Relief"s but they were local fund-raising groups, not the big outfit that was handling shipping and delivery. Finn-jd-john (talk) 14:07, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * yes we need to rename it to  Commission for Relief in Belgium Rjensen (talk) 20:05, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Money Totals
"In the end, the C.R.B. spent $895 billion to buy and ship 11.4 billion pounds (5.7 million tons) of food to 9.5 million civilian victims of the war.[4] The committee chartered ships to carry the food to Belgian ports under safe conduct terms arranged by Hoover in meetings with the British and German authorities." It might be advisable to check that $895 billion total. It is a vast amount of money for 1914-1918/19 and in fact more than the total cost of WWI to all the warring powers according to Niall Ferguson. The food works out to less than a pound per person per day (?) but those totals should also be subjected to scrutiny as well. --Boytinck (talk) 16:15, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I think its million not billion. Note that Belgian farms continued to operate and provided a lot of food. Rjensen (talk) 20:18, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * According to Frank M. Surface and Raymond L. Bland (American Food in the World War and Reconstruction Period. Stanford 1931, p. ix) Hoover handled 5,234,028,208.56 $ from 1914 to 1924 (including the operations of the United States Food Administration). The Belgian Relief started with 4.82 million $/month from the British and 3 million from the French. In the last year they needed 25 million $/month. The total made 1 billion $ for the four years (according to the Hoover memoirs). 130.83.23.163 (talk) 16:56, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Commission for Relief in Belgium. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070829191024/http://www.ecommcode.com/hoover/hooveronline/HooverCRB/CRBIntro.html to http://www.ecommcode.com/hoover/hooveronline/HooverCRB/CRBIntro.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 08:39, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

Flour Sacks
This line doesn't really add up

"was able to feed 11,000,000 Belgians"

The population of Belgium was 7.5 million at the start of the war, by the end of 1914 about 1.5 million were refugees in The Netherlands, the Uk and France. Even if you take into account the regular birthrate from that time (which dropped dramatically during the war) there's no sensible way to explain the 11 million number. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Finniemc (talk • contribs) 20:06, 12 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Germany was covertly supplied by Hoover and Francqui via the Belgian Relief, in order to keep WW1 going. Belgians themselves went without and were on the brink of Starvation, while Hoover profited vastly. This is all well documented but too controversial for Wikipedia 109.148.197.239 (talk) 00:49, 3 October 2021 (UTC)