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Transnational Co-Operation in Food, Agriculture, Environment and Health in Historical Perspective: Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2011

CORNELIA KNAB  and
AMALIA RIBI FORCLAZ
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Extract

In September 2000, the United Nations (UN) presented the ‘Millennium Development Goals’, a universal political agenda to tackle what it perceived to be the most pressing problems of the coming century. The Millennium Development Goals featured strategies for the fight against extreme poverty, hunger and malnutrition, the improvement of public health, the protection of the environment and the build-up of global developmental structures and partnerships. The achievement of these goals was scheduled, somewhat optimistically, for 2015. The brief time span was intended to illustrate the urgency of the issues and to spur the world into action. Just over a decade after their announcement, and not unexpectedly, the realisation of these goals has proved to be fraught with problems and by now the prospect of their universal achievement has receded into the distant future. Despite huge publicity and public endorsement, the UN's expectations for progress or at least alleviation of major problems are now difficult to maintain as the situation has been exacerbated by global food, economic and financial crises. Comprehensive global success stories, such as the eradication of certain infectious diseases, are rare. As the UN's progress review shows, the close and complex entwinement of these problems within the context of globalisation remains a major challenge.

Type
Introduction
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 20 , Issue 3: Transnational Cooperation in Food, Agriculture, Environment and Health in Historical Perspective , August 2011 , pp. 247 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 For detailed information about the state of progress towards the Millennium Development Goals in different regions see: United Nations, The Millennium Development Goals Report 2010 (New York: United Nations, 2010), available at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/reports.shtml (last visited 8 March 2011).

2 Famously, the global eradication of smallpox was accomplished three decades ago. The announcement by the UN of the eradication of cattle plague (rinderpest), the disease responsible for severe losses of livestock in past centuries, is apparently to be expected in the course of 2011. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), ‘Progress report on rinderpest eradication efforts as of October 2010. Success stories and actions required prior to the Global Declaration in 2011’, available at http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/46383/icode/ (last visited 8 March 2011).

3 The idea was put forward to the League Assembly in September 1935 by the Australian delegate and former Prime Minister Stanley M. Bruce. Société des Nations, Actes de la Seizième Session Ordinaire de l'Assemblée, Séances Plénières, Compte-rendu des débats, Quatrième Séance Plénière (11 septembre 1935, Journal Officiel de la Société des Nations, Supplément Spécial No. 138 (Genève: Société des Nations, 1935), 52. Staples, Amy L. S. [Sayward], The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2006), 72–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Most papers in this special issue were first presented at a conference held in Oxford in June 2009, organised as a joint project by the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ (University of Heidelberg) and the Modern European History Research Centre (University of Oxford). The participants set out to explore overlaps between several specialist disciplines of historical research and to discuss the methodological and thematic entanglements of the theme areas with a time frame reaching from the late nineteenth century to the reorganisation of global co-operation after the Second World War. We gratefully acknowledge the inputs of the chairs and panellists at the workshop: Sunil Amrith, Patricia Clavin, Madeleine Herren, David Lewis and Corinne Pernet.

5 The content of the League of Nations Handbook of International Organizations series and the networking of international organisations can be explored via the research database LONSEA (University of Heidelberg): www.lonsea.org (last visited 8 March 2011).

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12 Iriye, Akira, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Boli, John and Thomas, George M., eds, Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Murphy, Craig N., International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Iriye, Akira, ‘Transnational History’, Contemporary European History, 13, 2 (2004), 211–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Contemporary European History, Special Issue on Transnationalism, 14, 4 (2005); Herren, Madeleine, Internationale Organisationen seit 1865. Eine Globalgeschichte der internationalen Ordnung (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 2009)Google Scholar. Also: Kennedy, Paul, The Parliament of Man. The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Random House, 2006)Google Scholar; Reinalda, Bob, ed., Routledge History of International Organizations (New York: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; Laqua, Daniel, ed., Internationalism Reconfigured. Transnational Ideas and Movements between the Wars (London: Tauris, 2011)Google Scholar.

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14 Barona, Josep L., ‘Nutrition and Health. The International Context during the Inter-war Crisis’, Social History of Medicine, 21, 1 (2008), 87–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Rural Life and the Problem of Nutrition: Technical Approaches by the League of Nations’, in Astri Andresen, Tore Grønli and Teemu Ryymin, eds., Science, Culture and Politics: European Perspectives on Medicine, Sickness and Health (Bergen: Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies, 2006), 201–214; idem, ‘International Organisations and the Developments of a Physiology of Nutrition during the 1930s, Food and History 6, 1 (2008), 133–166; Bashford, Alison, ed., Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)Google Scholar; Borowy, Iris, ‘Counting Death and Disease: Classification of Death and Disease in the Interwar Years, 1919–1939’, Continuity and Change, 18, 3 (2003), 457–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Die internationale Gesundheitspolitik des Völkerbundes zwischen globalem Denken und europäischem Führungsanspruch’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 54, 10 (2006), 864–75; Borowy, Iris, ed., Of Medicine and Men: Biographies and Ideas in European Social Medicine between the World Wars (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2008)Google Scholar; idem, Coming to Terms with World Health: The League of Nations Health Organisation 1921–1946 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2009). Weindling, Paul, ed., International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Role of International Organizations in Setting Nutritional Standards in the 1920s and 1930s’, Clio Medica, 32 (1995), 319–32; idem, ‘Philanthropy and World Health: The Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations Health Organisation’, Minerva, 35 (1997), 269–81; Amrith, Sunil, Decolonising International Health. India and Southeast Asia, 1930–1965 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)Google Scholar.

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18 For two groundbreaking examples, see the special issues edited by Rosental, Paul André, ed., ‘Health and Safety at Work. A Transnational History’, Journal of Modern European History, 7, 2 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the special issue edited by Conrad, Christoph, ed., ‘Sozialpolitik transnational’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 32, 4 (2006)Google Scholar, in particular Madeleine Herren, ‘Sozialpolitik und die Historisierung des Transnationalen’, 542–59.

19 Herren, Madeleine and Zala, Sacha, Netzwerk Aussenpolitik. Internationale Kongresse und Organisationen als Instrumente der schweizerischen Aussenpolitik, 1914–1950 (Zurich: Chronos, 2002)Google Scholar.

20 As a recent study on the role of agricultural experts in the transition from colonial to postcolonial development shows, many professionals in colonial agriculture, forestry and veterinary departments became involved in international organisations such as the World Bank and the FAO. Joseph Hodge, ‘British Colonial Expertise, Postcolonial Careering and the Early History of International Development’, in Andreas Eckert, Stephan Malinowski and Corinna Unger, eds, Journal of Modern European History, Special Issue on ‘Modernizing Missions: Approaches to “Developing” the Non-Western World after 1945’, 8, 1 (2010), 24–46; idem, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007); Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar. See also Amrith, Decolonizing International Health and Staples, Birth of Development.

21 Haas, Peter M., ‘Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Co-ordination, International Organization 46, 1 (1992), 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Such an optimistic view informs Iriye, Global Community. See also Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Transnational Advocacy Networks in International and Regional politics’, International Social Science Journal, UNESCO, 159 (March 1999), 89–101.

23 On this point see the excellent article by Murard, Lion, ‘Designs within Disorder. International Conferences on Rural Health Care and the Art of the Local, 1931–1939’, in Solomon, Susan Gross, Murard, Lion and Zylberman, Patrick, eds, Shifting Boundaries of Public Health: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 141–174Google Scholar.

24 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129, 1 (2000), 1–29Google Scholar.