4 - The Machinery of Development: FAO’s Rinderpest Campaigns

Summary

Chapter 4 centers on FAO’s efforts to eradicate rinderpest during the final years of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s. It shows that FAO embraced rinderpest eradication because it believed that the new vaccines had made it an achievable goal and because FAO believed that victory in that effort would help demonstrate FAO’s own value and the value of internationalism in general. The vaccines encouraged a biological approach to development: one that pitted humans against nonhuman foes to emphasize the idea of a common humanity. This chapter not only enriches the development narrative by focusing on FAO, whose role has been largely overlooked, but also the global community narrative by highlighting its biological component.