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From the International Institute of Agriculture to the Food and Agriculture Organization
1 This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement no. 949722).Federico D’Onofrio
When the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations took over the liquidated International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) in 1948, it signalled a paradigmatic shift in the mission of international organisations devoted to agriculture. While the main focus of the IIA had been, since its foundation, the defence of farmers’ income through transparent markets, the new organisation focused instead on food and the ways to increase its production.
2 On the Institute’s establishment and role, see Niccolò Mignemi, ‘Italian Agricultural Experts as Transnational Mediators: The Creation of the International Institute of Agriculture, 1905 to 1908’, Agricultural History Review 65 (2017), 254–76; id., ‘Une Chambre au service des agriculteurs? L’Italie et les origines de l’Institut international d’agriculture’ (unpublished memoir of the École française de Rome, Rome, École française de Rome, 2016). According to Giuseppe Ugo Papi, then Secretary General of the Italian Committee of the FAO, the Institute, which had been the first instance of international collaboration in agriculture, had concentrated its action on the trade of agricultural commodities and farmers’ income. FAO’s mission, instead, combined trade with a core concern for ‘structure’, that is for the productivity of the agricultural sector in developing countries.
3 Giovanni Ugo Papi, McDougall Memorial Lecture 1967. Giuseppe Ugo Papi: Meeting the World Food Crisis (Rome: FAO, 1967). Indeed, the two organisations had very different purposes.
In this chapter we discuss how such paradigmatic shifts in international agricultural cooperation were brought about by two discontinuities in the international discourse on agriculture. The crises that hit the world economy in the early 1920s and early 1930s caused a first shift, while the primacy assigned to development problems in US policy after 1945 marked a second break that determined the mission and activities of the FAO for most of the post-war period.
The chapter’s first section describes the impact of the two economic crises that hit the major world economies before the Second World War; namely, the recession of 1920–1 and the Great Depression, when buffer stocks and restrictions on production were discussed at the IIA and the League of Nations as ways to deal with agricultural surpluses. In fact, during the inter-war years, western Europe, which had traditionally absorbed the agricultural production of many overseas exporters, strived for self-sufficiency, generating a dramatic disequilibrium for certain crucial crops. At the same time, this period – as the second section demonstrates – saw the spreading awareness that global markets for agricultural commodities needed regulation to guarantee nutrition and dispose of excess production. Besides the issue of protecting farmers’ income, ‘hunger was no longer seen solely as a symptom of regional crises but became an expression of global imbalances; it began to be viewed as a problem that was not going to be solved without some form of international regulation’.
4 Ruth Jachertz and Alexander Nützenadel, ‘Coping with Hunger? Visions of a Global Food System, 1930–1960’, J. Global History 6 (2011), 102. As Jachertz and Nutzenadel remarked, the creation of the FAO in the 1940s resulted from these discussions. In its third section, this chapter recalls how the FAO, which was born out of concerns for the food supply, took on, over the years, a mission in development. In the 1950s, the fight against hunger combined with a growing awareness that terms of trade were unfavourable to countries exporting agricultural commodities, and that, therefore, the productivity of their agriculture had to increase while their industry developed. Meanwhile though, the agrarian lobbies of the Atlantic economy that had pushed for the creation of the IIA reorganised themselves at a national level or through regional blocs, such as the EEC, to achieve their policy objectives, such as a disposal of the agricultural surpluses in ways that would not endanger the income levels of producers.
So here we retrace how international organisations were involved in the effort to manage the legacy of the 1920s: tariff protection and structural agricultural surpluses in some countries and widespread famine risk across most of the developing world. During the inter-war years, dramatic drops in prices of agricultural products stimulated international plans for integrating persistent surpluses into the structure of world trade. While historians have already pointed out the continuities between development projects of the post-war period and previous colonial experiences as well as Roosevelt’s New Deal,
5 Among others, Corinna R. Unger, International Development: A Postwar History (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). this chapter insists specifically on the necessity of multilateral agreements as the main lesson of the inter-war period for international agricultural policies. Finally, it also analyses how the emerging focus on ‘plenty’ paved the way for the unresolved conflict in the post-war period, between the development policies supported by the FAO and the agricultural policies of developed countries, which ultimately undermined any unitary approach to food and agriculture.