In the small group discussions, speaker after speaker related his personal experiences in dealing with the disastrous food shortages and supported the need for more national inputs to solve the problem once and for all. For many leaders, these discussions provided a personal catharsis, as they acknowledged publicly the failures they had not yet faced so directly, failures that had caused the vast suffering and deaths that they had seen personally. Even if they laid primary blame on higher officials, they could not completely escape responsibility; for many officials it was a trauma from which
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