Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:50:27.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Coping with hunger? Visions of a global food system, 1930–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2011

Ruth Jachertz  and
Alexander Nützenadel
Ruth Jachertz
Affiliation:
Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität, Unter den Linden 6, D-10099 Berlin, Germany E-mail: [email protected]
Alexander Nützenadel
Affiliation:
E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of a new model of global food politics. This model was strongly moulded by the experiences of the Great Depression and the two world wars, all of which had brought hunger and malnutrition back to Europe. Whereas until the nineteenth century famines and food shortages had commonly been interpreted as regional Malthusian crises, they were now attributed to global economic disturbances and imbalances. This article explores how the far-reaching plans of a World Food Board, advocated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization under John Boyd Orr, were abandoned and supplanted by a new approach that focused on technical aid and the distribution of surpluses. Moreover, the problems of hunger and malnutrition were embedded in a larger discourse on world population and economic development.

Keywords

agriculturefoodFood and Agriculture Organizationhungerinequality
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 99 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Garden City: Doubleday, 1962.

2 Cable, Vincent, Globalization and global governance, London: Pinter, 1999Google Scholar; Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the world: international organizations in global politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

3 Michael Wallace and David J. Singer, ‘Intergovernmental organization in the global system, 1815–1964: a quantitative description’, International Organization, 24, 1970, pp. 239–87; Murphy, Craig N., International organization and industrial change: global governance since 1850, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994Google Scholar; Akira Iriye, Global community: the role of international organization in the making of the contemporary world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

4 Ohmae, Kenichi, The end of the nation state: the rise of regional economies, New York: Free Press, 1995Google Scholar; Stephen D. Krasner, ed., Problematic sovereignty: contested rules and political possibilities, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

5 Important for the early history of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): Staples, Amy L. S., The birth of development: how the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization changed the world, 1945–1965, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006, pp. 64–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also D. John Shaw, World food security: a history since 1945, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

6 Eichengreen, Barry, Globalizing capital: a history of the international monetary system, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996Google Scholar; Bordo, Michael D. and Eichengreen, Barry, eds., A retrospective on the Bretton Woods system: lessons for international monetary reform, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997Google Scholar; Kennedy, Paul, The parliament of man: the United Nations and the quest for world government, London: Penguin Press, 2006Google Scholar; Toye, John and Toye, Richard, The UN and global political economy: trade, finance, and development, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Berthelot, Yves, ed., Unity and diversity in development ideas: perspectives from the UN regional commissions, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Louis Emmeriji, Richard Jolly, and Thomas G. Weiss, Ahead of the curve? UN ideas and global challenges, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2001; Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, Dharam Ghai, and Frédéric Lapeyre, UN contributions to development thinking and practice, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004; Craig N. Murphy, The United Nations Development Programme: a better way?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

7 Hardach, Gerd, The First World War 1914–1918, London: Allen, 1977Google Scholar; Tracy, Michael, Government and agriculture in Western Europe, 1880–1988, New York: New York University Press, 1988, pp. 119–211Google Scholar; Alexander Nützenadel, ‘A green international? Food markets and transnational politics (1850–1914)’, in Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann, eds., Food and globalization: consumption, markets and politics in the modern world, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2008, pp. 153–73.

8 Vincent, C. Paul, The politics of hunger: the Allied blockade of Germany, 1915–1919, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985Google Scholar; Avner Offer, The First World War: an agrarian interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.

9 See Corni, Gustavo, Hitler and the peasants: agrarian policy of the Third Reich, 1930–1939, New York: Berg, 1990Google Scholar; Gerlach, Christian, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord: Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998Google Scholar; Alexander Nützenadel, Landwirtschaft, Staat und Autarkie: Agrarpolitik im faschistischen Italien 1922–1943, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997.

10 See Burnett, John and Oddy, Derek J., eds., The origins and development of food policies in Europe, London: Leicester University Press, 1994Google Scholar; Frank Trentmann, ‘Coping with shortage: the problem of food security and global visions of coordination, c. 1890s–1950’, in Frank Trentmann and Flemming Just, eds., Food and conflict in Europe in the age of the two world wars, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 13–48.

11 Bertrand M. Patenaude, The big show in Bololand: the American relief expedition to Soviet Russia in the famine of 1921, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

12 Cited in Wolfgang Eckart, ‘Nach bestem Vermögen tatkräftige Hilfe leisten: die Deutsche Hungerhilfe – Vorhaben und Wirkungen’, Ruperto Carola, 3, 1999, p. 16.

13 See for example, League of Nations, Economic Committee, The agricultural crisis, Geneva: League of Nations, 1931.

14 Houillier, Francois, L’organisation internationale de l’agriculture: les institutions agricoles internationales et l’action internationale en agriculture, Paris: Librairie Technique et Économique, 1935, pp. 290–1Google Scholar.

15 Trentmann, ‘Coping with shortage’, pp. 28–9.

16 International Institute for Agriculture, The first world agricultural census (1930): a methodological study on the questions contained in the forms adopted for the purposes of census in the various countries, Rome: International Institute for Agriculture, 1937.

17 Fosdick, Raymond Blaine, The old savage in the new civilization, Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1931, pp. 179–80Google Scholar.

18 Deborah Fitzgerald, ‘Exporting American agriculture: the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, 1943–1953’, Social Studies of Science, 16, 1986, pp. 457–83; Marcos Cueto, ed., Missionaries of science: the Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.

19 Nick Cullather, ‘Miracles of modernization: the Green Revolution and the apotheosis of technology’, Diplomatic History, 28, 2, 2004, pp. 227–54.

20 Staples, Birth of development, pp. 64–74; see also Nick Cullather, ‘The foreign policy of the calorie’, American Historical Review, 112, 2007, pp. 337–64.

21 Dana Simmons, ‘Starvation science: from colonies to metropole’, in Nützenadel and Trentmann, Food and globalization, pp. 173–91.

22 John Boyd Orr, Food, health and income: report on a survey of diet in relation to income, London: Macmillan, 1936.

23 League of Nations, Final report of the Mixed Committee on the relation of nutrition to health, agriculture and economic policy, Geneva: League of Nations, 1937.

24 League of Nations, Economic Committee, The agricultural crisis.

25 Cited in Yates, Lamartine P., So bold an aim: ten years of international co-operation toward freedom from want, Rome: FAO, 1955, p. 41Google Scholar.

26 League of Nations, ‘Economic appeasement’, in League of Nations Official Journal, annex no. 1681, 1937, pp. 1222–9; see also Frank L. McDougall, Food and welfare, Geneva: Geneva Research Centre, 1938; Sean Turnell, ‘McDougall: éminence grise of Australian economic diplomacy’, Australian Economic History Review, 40, 2000, pp. 51–69.

27 Eric Roll, The Combined Food Board, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957.

28 FAO Archives, RG 2, b.1, f.1, ‘Note of the meeting to discuss the organization of the Combined Food Board, July 1943, 15th’, Appendix B.

29 Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Food supplies and the Japanese occupation in South-East Asia, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998.

30 FAO Archives, RG 2, b.1, f.1, ‘Note of the meeting held at the Ministry of Food to discuss the organization of the Combined Food Board, July 31st, 1943’; ‘The future of the Combined Food Board, September 20th, 1943’.

31 Herbert H. Lehman (17 June 1943), in The Department of State Bulletin, S. 539–43.

32 Maggie Black, A cause for our times: Oxfam the first 50 years, Oxford: Oxfam Professional, 1992.

33 Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: a short history, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2009, pp. 159–94.

34 Vernon, James, Hunger: a modern history, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007, pp.146–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Martin H. Geyer, ‘Social rights and citizenship during World War II’, in Manfred Berg and Martin H. Geyer, eds., Two cultures of rights: Germany and the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 143–66.

36 See e.g. FAO Archives, RG 3, f. 290, ‘The problem of China’s post-war food supply. Report by the Chinese delegation, May 1943’.

37 FAO Archives, RG 3, f. 233, ‘Final Act of the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, Hot Springs, June 3rd, 1943’.

38 Luciano Tosi, ‘The League of Nations, the International Institute of Agriculture and the food question’, in Marta Petricioli and Donatella Cherubini, eds., For peace in Europe: institutions and civil society between the world wars, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 117–38.

39 For details on the discussions at the Hot Springs Conference, see FAO Archives, RG 3, b. 1–4, United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture in Hot Springs.

40 Ó Gráda, Famine, pp. 159–94; Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: rationing, controls, and consumption 1939–1955, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; Tony Judt, Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945, New York: Penguin Books, 2005, pp. 21–2; Paul H. Kratoska, ‘Commercial rice cultivation and the regional economy of Southeastern Asia, 1850–1950’, in Nützenadel and Trentmann, Food and globalization, pp. 83–7.

41 ‘The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’, International Organization, 1, 2, 1947, pp. 121–3.

42 FAO Report of Special Session, Report of the Conference of FAO – Second Session, Section E VII, http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5583e/x5583e00.htm#Contents (consulted 3 December 2010).

43 For a discussion of the World Food Appraisal 1946–7, see Report of the Conference of FAO – Second Session, XII: Report of Commission C to the Conference, http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5583e/x5583e0e.htm#xii.%20report%20of%20commission%20c%20to%20the%20conference (consulted 15 June 2010).

44 Proposal for a World Food Board, Washington, DC: FAO Press, 1946. The proposal is discussed in Staples, Birth of development, pp. 85–94; and Shaw, World food security, pp. 15–31.

45 Staples, Birth of development, p. 87.

46 Shaw, World food security, p. 26.

47 Ibid., p. 29.

48 Schild, Georg, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks: American economic and political postwar planning in the summer of 1944, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995Google Scholar; Bordo and Eichengreen, Retrospective.

49 Orr, John Boyd, As I recall, London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1966, p. 176Google Scholar.

50 For the deterioration of US and Soviet relations between 1946 and 1947 see Leffler, Melvyn P., A preponderance of power: national security, the Truman administration, and the Cold War, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992, chs. 3 and 4Google Scholar.

51 Sergio Marchisio and Antonietta di Blase, The Food and Agriculture Organization, Dordrecht: M.Nijhoff, 1991, p. 17; Staples, Birth of development, p. 89.

52 Ruttan, Vernon W., United States development assistance policy: the domestic politics of foreign economic aid, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 394Google Scholar.

53 British Food Journal, 49, 3, 1947, p. 21.

54 Norris E. Dodd, ‘The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: its history, organization and objectives’, Agricultural History, 23, 2, 1949, pp. 81–6.

55 Report of the Conference of FAO – Fifth Session, IV b: International commodity clearing house proposals, http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5579e/x5579e04.htm#b.%20international%20commodity%20problems (consulted 3 December 2010).

56 Report of group of experts on the establishment of an emergency famine reserve, Rome: FAO, 1953; Functions of a world food reserve: scope and limitations, Rome: FAO, 1956; National food reserve policies in underdeveloped countries, Rome: FAO, 1958.

57 Rothstein, Robert L., Global bargaining: UNCTAD and the quest for a New International Economic Order, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979Google Scholar; Timothy E. Josling, Stefan Tangermann, and T. K. Warley, Agriculture in the GATT, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press 1996.

58 Ronald W. Andersen and Christopher Gilbert, ‘Commodity agreements’, in Peter Newman et al., eds., New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance, vol. 1, London: Macmillan, 1992, pp. 389–92; Christopher Gilbert, ‘International commodity agreements: design and performance’, World Development, 15, 5, 1987, pp. 591–616; History of the International Wheat Agreement, London: International Wheat Council, 1991 (unpublished document).

59 Federico, Giovanni, Feeding the world: an economic history of agriculture, 1800–2000, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 19Google Scholar.

60 Ibid., p. 196.

61 Rosemary Fennell, The Common Agricultural Policy: continuity and change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

62 Shaw, World food security, lists over 100 UN organizations responsible for food security.

63 Sen, Binay Ranjan, Towards a newer world: the life of a senior Indian diplomat and former Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Dublin: Tycooly, 1982, p. 249Google Scholar.

64 On EPTA, see Stokke, Olav, The UN and development: from aid to cooperation, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009, ch. 2Google Scholar; David Owen, ‘The United Nations expanded program of technical assistance: a multilateral approach’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 32, 3, 1959, pp. 25–32. Examples of the FAO’s early field activities can be found in Gove Hambidge, The Story of FAO, New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1955, chs. 8–11.

65 Stokke, UN and development, pp. 50–2.

66 The FAO received about 29% of all funds in the first year of operation (1949) and between one-quarter and one-third of funds between 1950 and 1965 (over these 15 years, US$128.7 million): see Stokke, UN and development, p. 66, table.

67 Murdoch, William W., The poverty of nations: the political economy of hunger and population, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, chs. 5 and 6, discusses a number of hurtful agricultural policiesGoogle Scholar.

68 John M. Staatz and Carl K. Eicher: ‘Agricultural development ideas in historical perspective’, in John M. Staatz and Carl K. Eicher, eds., International agricultural development, 3rd edn, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, pp. 9–10. On the long history of theories of modernization (with an emphasis on sociologists), see Wolfgang Knöbl, Spielräume der Modernisierung: das Ende der Eindeutigkeit, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2001. Walt W. Rostow, Stages of economic growth: a non-communist manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, was the text that probably influenced policymaking and public opinion most; see Michael E. Latham, Modernization as ideology: American social science and ‘nation building’ in the Kennedy era, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

69 C. Peter Timmer, ‘The agricultural transformation’, in Staatz and Eicher, International agricultural development, p. 123.

70 G. Edward Schuh and Antonio Salazar P. Brandao, ‘The theory, empirical evidence and debates on agricultural development issues in Latin America’, in Lee R. Martin, ed., A survey of agricultural economics literature: agriculture in economic development, 1940s to 1990s, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, pp. 572–96.

71 Rapley, John, Understanding development: theory and practice in the Third World, 3rd edn, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007, p. 51Google Scholar. See also Reynolds, Lloyd G., Economic growth in the Third World, 1850–1980, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 424–7Google Scholar. The first to describe the urban bias was Michael Lipton, Why poor people stay poor, London: Temple Smith, 1977; see also Staatz and Eicher, ‘Agricultural development ideas’, p. 13.

72 Frankel, Francine, India’s Green Revolution: economic gains and political costs, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971Google Scholar; Griffin, Keith, The political economy of agrarian change, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974Google Scholar; D. K. Freebairn, ‘Did the Green Revolution concentrate incomes? A quantitative study of research reports’, World Development, 23, 2, 1995, pp. 265–79. Freebairn reviewed 300 academic studies on the Green Revolution during the period 1970–1989. Over 80% of these studies concluded that greater inequalities resulted.

73 According to World Trade Organization statistics, agricultural production grew faster than world population. In the period from 1950 to 2000, agricultural production tripled – growing at a median of 2.3% annually, while world population increased by 2.4 times.

74 Sen spoke to the UN Population Commission on 30 March 1965: FAO Archive, RG 8, b. 49, ‘Program and Policy Board, Summary Record: Meeting 766, Tuesday, 6 April 1965’.

75 See ‘FAO/WHO seminar of food and nutrition problems in Africa, South of Sahara (Belgian Congo, May 1959)’, Rome: FAO, 1959; Proceedings of the West African Conference on Nutrition and Child Feeding (Dakar, Senegal, March 1968), Rome: FAO, 1968; ‘Report on curriculum development on the population and family life education project, Arusha, Tanzania’, Rome: FAO, 1980.

76 ‘The role of rural women in home economics and nutrition’, FAO Nutrition Newsletter, 8, 3, 1970, pp. 33–8; Proceedings of conference on planning a home economics program for community development works (Nairobi 1965), Rome: FAO, 1965.

77 FAO and Unesco, Man and hunger, Rome: FAO, 1959; Collins, Peter, Millions still go hungry, Rome: FAO, 1962Google Scholar; Otto Fischnich, The world’s food supply: needs – possibilities – prospects up to the year 2000, Rome: FAO, 1967.

78 Sartaj Aziz, ‘The world food situation: today and in the year 2000’, in Proceedings of the World Food Conference of 1976, Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1977, p. 23.

79 Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a small planet, New York: Ballantine Books, 1971. It promoted a vegetarian diet with a focus on proteins found in grain/legume combinations.

80 Singer, Hans, Wood, John, and Jennings, Tony, Food aid: the challenge and the opportunity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, p. 21Google Scholar.

81 Wallerstein, Mitchel B., Food for war, food for peace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980Google Scholar; Kirsten Ahlberg, Transplanting the great society: Lyndon Johnson and food for peace, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008.

82 Vernon W. Ruttan, ‘The politics of U.S. food aid policy: a historical review’, in Ruttan, Vernon W., ed., Why food aid?, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 2–38Google Scholar.

83 National Archives of the United States (NARA), RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files 1967–1969, AGR 15, Box 427, GATT files.

84 Ruttan, United States development, p. 395.

85 Singer, Wood, and Jennings, Food aid.

86 Harriet Friedmann, ‘The political economy of food: the rise and fall of the postwar international food trade’, American Journal of Sociology, supplement, 88, 1982, pp. 248–86; Christopher Barrett, ‘Food aid’s intended and unintended consequences’, Esa Working Paper, 5, 2006; see also www.fao.org/es/esa (consulted 3 December 2010).

87 Bairoch, Paul, Economics and world history: myths and paradoxes, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 150–8 and passimGoogle Scholar.