6.1 A tale of two crises
International collaboration in agriculture before the Second World War was dominated by networks of European and North-American farmers’ organisations, who put the defence of the interests of agriculturalists at the centre of their action. The IIA, as proven by the investigations carried out by Mignemi, was initially born as an attempt at international collaboration not just between governments but – more importantly – between farmers’ organisations from various countries: the US, most European states, the British settler colonies and some South American countries. The group who launched the initiative and gathered international support for the Institute had in mind a sort of international farmers’ organisation, an International Chamber of Agriculture, in the words of David Lubin, that should counter the overwhelming power of industrial capital and labour.
1 Niccolò Mignemi, ‘David Lubin and the International Institute of Agriculture’, in Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The Story of the FAO Library: 65th Anniversary, 1952–2017 (Rome: FAO, 2017), 1–20; Mignemi, ‘Une Chambre au service des agriculteurs?’. In the end, governments prevented the direct participation of farmers’ organisations in the affairs of the Institute, which developed instead as an inter-governmental international organisation. Its main task was to collect and share information and knowledge, but its original mission – namely, the defence of agricultural interests and, in particular, of farmers’ income – remained central to its action and was inscribed in the founding treaty. Its statistics were, indeed, meant to improve the functioning of commodity markets and thus – its promoters hoped – the condition of agricultural producers.
2 Federico D’Onofrio and Niccolò Mignemi, ‘The International Institute of Agriculture and the Information Infrastructure of World Trade (1905–1946)’, Histoire & Mesure XXXVIII, (2023), 13–38.After the First World War the Institute was solicited by the Chinese ambassador in Rome to help relieve the Chinese famine of 1920–1, but it had neither the means nor really the will to coordinate food relief. The Institute was equally uninvolved in the Volga famine of the following year. At the World Economic Conferences of Genoa (1922) and Geneva (1927), instead, the Institute’s leadership and its allies in various nations concentrated on issues of international trade and the balance between agricultural and industrial prices. This focus reflected, to a great extent, the interests of (mostly European) farmers’ organisations amid the economic turmoil of the post-war period.
3 Federico D’Onofrio, ‘Agricultural Numbers: The Statistics of the International Institute of Agriculture in the Interwar Period’, Agricultural History Review 65 (2017), 277–96.Many economists believed that a prolonged period of crisis had lasted from 1920 until 1927, although they acknowledged that the situation had improved a little over time. Economists from the US pointed to the weakness of European demand for foreign foodstuffs, due to failing industrial exports and high indebtedness, as root causes of the enduring agricultural malaise.
4 Ernest Minor Patterson, Europe in 1927: An Economic Survey (American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1927). At the World Economic Conference of 1927, Max Sering, one of Germany’s most renowned agricultural experts, arrived with a report on the agricultural depression that stated that the crisis had lasted from 1920 to 1924 and that the subsequent recovery had not been robust. Sering acknowledged that the reduced purchasing power of Europeans, ruined by the war, bore a major responsibility for the crisis, but he insisted on the peculiarly unfortunate situation of agriculturalists: while they had benefitted greatly from price rises during the war, they were subsequently squeezed by industrial prices that rose even faster, a phenomenon known as the ‘price scissors’.
5 Max Sering, Axel Schindier and Rudolf Lerch, Internationale Preisbewegung und Lage der Landwirtschaft in den aussertropischen Ländern (Berlin: Parey, 1929). Sering denied, nevertheless, that there had been a real problem of overproduction, since Europe had lost one of its main suppliers; namely, the Russian empire. Max Sering, ‘Causes of the International Depression of Agriculture’, in Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Agricultural Economists Held at Cornell University, Ithaca; New York, August 18 to August 29, 1930 (Menasha: George Banta Publishing Company, 1930), 19–39. This narrative obviously underlined the vulnerability of farmers and their weakness vis-à-vis other corporate interests. A similar point of view was confirmed in the report of the Commission Internationale d’Agriculture put together by the French Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé and the Swiss Ernst Laur, the two leaders of a Europe-wide alliance of farmers and landowners.
6 Laur and De Vogüé asked agricultural associations that participated in the Commission Internationale d’Agriculture to request their members to compare 1925/26 prices with pre-war prices, Commission International d’Agriculture to Federatieve Nederlandsche Zuivelbond (circular letter), draft questionnaire, Collectie 117 F.E: Posthuma C 22285, 2.21.026.07, omslag 129, Nationaal Archief ten Haag. On the alliance, see Gilbert Noël, ‘La solidarité agricole européenne: des congrès d’agriculture à la politique agricole commune’, in Sociétés rurales du 20. siècle: France, Italie et Espagne, Jordi Canal, Gilles Pecout and Maurizio Ridolfi (eds) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2004). Jules Gauthier, the Secretary of the Société des Agriculteurs de France and a close collaborator of De Vogüé, the German Andreas Hermes, President of the Association of Farmers’ Unions and Harry Lindsay, presented the report to the Preparatory Committee for the International Economic Conference in 1926.
7 Jules Gautier, Andreas Hermes and Harry Alexander Fanshawe Lindsay, L’agriculture et la crise économique internationale: Mémoire (Genève, Société des Nations, 1927); D’Onofrio, ‘Agricultural Numbers’. The consequence was the conviction that farmers should somehow be protected.
While not all European agrarian leaders shared either the diagnosis or the remedies proposed by the protectionist front – Folckert Posthuma, who represented Dutch milk producers, for instance, heavily criticised Laur and the Commission Internationale in the press
8 Laur to Posthuma, 8 July 1927, Collectie 117 F.E: Posthuma C 22285, 2.21.026.07, omslag 130, Nationaal Archief ten Haag. – this narrative dominated the discourse of agrarian organisations over the course of the 1920s: farmers had been victims of an imbalance between agricultural and industrial prices (the price scissors) and were therefore entitled to some form of compensation from governments. The IIA came to Geneva with a thick report that insisted on a similar interpretation, though mediating between its diverse membership, which included wheat-exporting Argentina and Yugoslavia, as well as countries, such as Italy, that had embarked on plans for reducing dependency on foreign food imports.
9 International Institute of Agriculture (ed.), Agricultural Problems in Their International Aspect (Monetary and Economic Conference, Rome: Printing Office of the International Institute of Agriculture, 1926).In 1928, Gautier, Hermes and Laur, as the representatives of large agrarian organisations from continental Europe to the League of Nations, repeated that the agricultural distress derived from revenue prices lower than input costs and invoked the creation of agreements between cooperatives of producers and consumers, with the help of the state, in order to increase production without depressing prices.
10 Jules Gautier, Andreas Hermes and Ernst Laur, ‘Economic Organisation. Consultative Committee Proposal by MIL Gautier, Hermes and Laur’, 25 April 1928. UN Archives Geneva, C-C-E--5_EN, available online at https://archives.ungeneva.org/economic-organisation-consultative-committee-proposal-by-mil-gautier-hermes-and-laur (accessed 25 December 2024). Laur was adamant that tariff protection of agriculture was indispensable: ‘he was convinced that it would be impossible to maintain the present area of cultivation in old agricultural countries without a certain measure of protection – and the resolutions adopted in Geneva did not contain a word about that necessity for protection’, as Per Jacobsson recalled in his ‘Report on a mission to attend the 13th International Congress on Agriculture May 26th-June 1st 1927’, 14 June 1927, UN Archives Geneva, R379/10/59565/21922. Laur had grandiose plans. When the Great Depression broke out in 1929, he restated his analysis of the causes of the agricultural depression, which the industrial depression, according to him, had not sparked but only aggravated.
This narrative was not uncontested. Many economists in the US and the UK blamed the economic downturn of the early 1930s and the persistent weakness of global trade on the growth of agricultural production in Continental Europe and the erection of protectionist barriers in favour of European farmers. Indeed, governments intervened heavily in agriculture in this period. If tariffs did grow compared to the very low level reached at the end of the war (but remained below 1913 levels for most European countries),
11 Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800–2000 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 192. it was other policies that really incentivised production and reduced European dependence on overseas imports. The famous ‘battles of wheat’ and other measures in favour of food producers that different European countries engaged in at various moments throughout the 1920s were meant to decrease huge trade deficits, but also to improve the degree of strategic autonomy. They were effective to a great degree. In the wake of the Great Depression, the Australian Frank Lidget McDougall calculated that European imports of wheat had declined from 322 million bushels (113,500,000 hl) in 1929 to 132 million bushels (46,500,000 hl) in 1933. Over the same period, imports of butter had declined from 2,987,000 cwt (151,800 tonnes) to 1,620,000 cwt (82,300 tonnes) and imports of beef and veal from 4,194,000 cwt (213,000 tonnes) to 1,948,000 cwt (99,000 tonnes).
12 Frank Lidget McDougall, The McDougall Memoranda (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1956), 2. At the Conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists in 1930, Mordecai Ezekiel (who became a central figure in the early FAO) suggested that:
by 1928, Europe had increased her output to 8 per cent above pre-war, and subsequently to even more; but North American production also increased, exceeding 25 per cent above pre-war in 1928. As a consequence, world production of foodstuffs, which in 1923 and 1924 was but 3 per cent above that of 1913, by 1928 had increased to 16½ per cent above 1913
which was more than the growth in population.
13 Mordecai Ezekiel, ‘The Problem of Agricultural Surpluses in the United States’, in Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Agricultural Economists, 74. While historians have recently disputed the actual occurrence of surpluses before the Great Depression,
14 Giovanni Federico, ‘Not Guilty? Agriculture in the 1920s and the Great Depression’, J. Economic History 65 (2005), 949–76. it is significant that at the time there was a widespread perception among non-European experts that the growth of European production had undermined global agriculture.
To the League of Nations Economic Committee, the British official Frederick Leith Ross, chief economic advisor to the government in London, presented a report that accused agricultural protectionism of having deepened the crisis. Ross’ report was accompanied by a much blander take by the Economic Committee that only condemned ‘excessive protectionism’.
15 Frederick Leith-Ross, Considerations on the Present Evolution of Agricultural Protectionism (Geneva: League of Nations, 1935). Laur vehemently rebutted these kinds of argument and responded furiously to Leith Ross and the League, arguing that the increase in European production of wheat had not been substantial and was merely the consequence of European farmers switching from rye to wheat, something only detailed data could reveal. It was up to overseas countries to reduce their production of cereals.
16 E. Laur, ‘À propos du rapport du Comité économique de la Société des Nations sur le protectionnisme agricole, Brougg, juin 1935’, Archiv fuer Agrargeschichte, Bern, 161.2.I.11.; E. Laur, ‘Comments on Views of the Economic Committee of the League of Nations on Agricultural Protectionism’, J. Farm Economics 17 (1935), 748–53.Instead, Laur reiterated that the problems of agriculture originated in the imbalance between the prices of the outputs and inputs of agricultural production. In the case of the surplus production of the Danubian countries, he ruled out the idea that the problems could be solved by increasing the income of city-dwellers in industrial countries because it was a proven law that they would not increase their consumption of foodstuffs in proportion to the increase in income. Moreover, there was a widespread consensus that poor countries in Asia and Africa, which were occasionally stricken by famines, would not be able to support an expanded demand.
17 A similar point was made in Ezekiel, ‘Problem of Agricultural Surpluses’, 75. Neither was it possible to lower input prices significantly. Once cereals had been identified as the price-defining element of agriculture, it became necessary to raise cereal prices by creating national monopolies and international pools that would purchase cereals and sell them at fixed prices, possibly turning excesses into biofuel.
18 Ernst Laur, ‘Note du professeur Laur sur l’organisation d’une société d’achat de céréales des pays de l’Europe orientale’, 16 June 1931, R2801/10D/13963/2016, UN Archives Geneva, https://archives.ungeneva.org/questions-agricole-correspondance-avec-lunion-suisse-des-paysans-prof-l-laur (accessed 17 September 2025).Laur’s proposals anticipated the Green Pool project and paved the way for the agricultural policy of western European countries in the post-war period. As Moser and Baumann have stressed, Laur was acutely aware of the necessity of finding international solutions to price problems.
19 Werner Baumann and Peter Moser, Bauern im Industriestaat: agrarpolitische Konzeptionen und bäuerliche Bewegungen in der Schweiz, 1918–1968 (Zürich: Orell Füssli, 1999), 132–3. It is clear, though, that his ideas, his politics and contacts were primarily concerned with Europe and limited in ambitions. In a letter dated 8 September 1934, the US American agricultural economist, Henry C. Taylor recalled his meeting with Laur at the International Congress of Agriculture in Budapest: ‘He does not have a grasp of the world situation, but a local reaction to it, and I am afraid the world is full of local reactions rather than rational plans.’
20 Taylor to Hobson, 8 September 1934, The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Henry C. Taylor Papers, 1896–1968, Box 23. In 1948, Laur went on to lead the newly-formed Confédération Européenne de l’Agriculture, an umbrella organisation that represented the right wing of European rural interests. It was a testament to the continuity in agrarian interest groups, but the world around him was changing, in Europe and beyond.
21 Baumann and Moser, Bauern im Industriestaat, 358.