6.3 The FAO, from trade to technical assistance

It was an extremely ramified and ambitious plan to feed the world in an economically sustainable way. It presupposed a reorganisation of global trade flows under a rather centralised management. In the end, though, the British and US American governments came to prefer a scheme based on the International Trade Organisation, which was supposed to deal with all aspects of trade, rather than have a separate organisation for agriculture. In retrospect, such grandiose plans for international cooperation may seem doomed from the start. In fact, the plan of the World Food Board seemed much less utopian in 1946, after more than a decade of discussions on international regulations, the experience of the Imperial Trade Board, and widespread practices of food boards and monopolies on foodstuffs in various countries. The scheme, as a booklet printed by the Department of State described it, with characteristically reassuring rhetoric, would reproduce on a global level the kind of ‘school lunch or food stamp plans familiar in the United States’.4 Ibid., 9.

Indeed, governments initially supported Orr’s proposal, which was presented at the Second Annual Conference of the FAO, held in Copenhagen in September 1946, and the two objectives it entailed: ‘provide diets on a health standard’ and ‘stabilizing agricultural prices at levels fair to producers and consumers alike’.5 Orr to the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Cuba, Egypt, France, India Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, UK, USA, 14 December 1946, FAO Archives, Lord John Boyd Orr’s papers, 0_1_1_A_3_01011945-31121948_Outgoing Letters to Governments and Governmental Agencies 1945-1956 before 1951. The FAO began therefore asking member states to analyse the experience of national offices in each country that managed the distribution of commodities at special prices to protected categories of people, the storage of foodstuffs and the financing of it.

The project in the end was set aside due to the objections of the United States and Great Britain. Before the US Congress decided not to ratify the 1948 Havana Charter of the International Trade Organisation, it seemed preferable to the delegations of the two major Western powers to have the international commodity trade discussed in the framework of overall negotiations on international trade, rather than by a ‘forum of likeminded and sympathetic agricultural professionals’ such as the FAO.6 Ivan D. Trofimov, ‘The Failure of the International Trade Organization (ITO): A Policy Entrepreneurship Perspective’, J. Politics and Law 5 (2012), 61. While the opposition of Britain and the United States is well-known and proved fatal to Orr’s project, it is interesting to analyse the initial reactions of other countries represented at the Preparatory Committee of the World Food Board in 1946. If these countries had much less weight in the final decision than the US and Britain, their response is revealing in relation to the concerns that emerged in the post-war phase.

Both those countries that were massive exporters, such as Brazil or Siam, and those, such as China or India, that were big importers of foreign foodstuffs but, due to their low income, were not likely to be in a position to pay for their imports in the foreseeable future, manifested a rather lukewarm support for the proposal. The presence of countries from what is (often inappropriately) called ‘Global South’ at the negotiating table was not a novelty, since they had been largely represented both in the meetings of the League of Nations and within the IIA, but in this context their delegations were confronted with a diminished European representation and their role was therefore much more significant.

The Brazilian delegation underlined that what was needed was not a short-term improvement in nutrition standards brought about by subsidised supplies of foodstuffs. Instead:

Among the structural importers, India and China represented the largest population. The representative of Kuomintang China, Chen Chih-Mai, was clearly too eager to secure food relief from UNRRA and the IEFC to oppose a plan that promised a permanent relief structure, even so he stressed the necessity of expanding domestic production.9 Ibid., Statement of the Chinese delegation.After recalling the 1943 Bengal famine, the Indian delegate insisted that, while India might indeed accept the supply of basic foodstuffs at a discounted price, the priority was that India increased its production through technical assistance. Agriculture could not be reduced to a commercial issue, and they would willingly take in the agricultural surpluses of the ‘chief exporting countries’ but would not enable them to ‘look for any considerable profits’. ‘[C]ountries like India’ he continued ‘should be offered in these few intervening lean years until they are able to stand on their own legs, their share of the marketable surplus almost on the basis of cost of production, and if it must be so, with a trifl[ing] overhead’.10 Ibid., Preparatory Committee, 016, 3. The goal though remained self-sufficiency, not a permanent system of regulated exchanges, and the priority was technical assistance to increase production.

This collection of statements by delegates of countries on the periphery, both importing and exporting nations, shows that Orr’s project was too radical but also not radical enough. It was not realistic to treat agriculture separately from the overall trade negotiations that were going on at the same time in London. Governments, as underlined by the Dutch delegate, were far from enthusiastic about the accumulation of costly and risky stocks. If developing countries aimed at self-sufficiency and productivity increases that would make competition in international markets even more challenging, European farmers were also organising to reduce foreign imports as soon as the post-war crisis had passed. Already in 1948, Laur activated what was left of his international network (decimated by the loss of Central and Eastern Europe to the Soviets) to create an organisation, the Confédération Européenne des Agriculteurs, to continue his campaign in favour of European farmers against the US-dominated International Federation of Agricultural Producers, at a time when North American grains were still crucial for deficit areas.11 Laur to Dr. F. Porchet, 22 Apr. 1948, Commission Internationale d’agriculture: Statuten und Entwuerfe, 1945-1948, Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv, J2.332-01, 611.0-01, Schachtel 2012/119_115

After the dismissal of the idea of a World Food Board, the FAO developed, above all, its programmes for direct technical assistance. In so doing, it was orientating its activities according to the new keywords of US-dominated world politics. In his famous re-election speech in 1949, the US president Harry Truman had listed as his fourth point a real pledge for international technical assistance to ‘make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realise their aspirations for a better life’.12 Cited in Ekbladh, Great American Mission, 81. Assistance to improve agricultural productivity was deemed crucial for the undernourished agricultural countries of the world. This was in part a purely strategic measure, taken to prevent further Communist advances in colonial and post-colonial countries, especially after Mao’s victory in the Chinese civil war.13 Cullather, Hungry World, 2–3. In part though, it reflected a growing concern with overpopulation. The reorientation of FAO towards development not only aligned with the Point IV policy of the United States (although Point IV was originally intended to promote industrial development) but, as we stressed above, also met the demands of developing countries, both exporters and importers of foodstuffs. In fact, the UNRRA, which was set up as a relief agency, had, by the end of its mandate in 1947–8, already started engaging in assistance and the FAO took over these activities.14 Ekbladh, Great American Mission, 89. For the FAO this became a crucial mission and the agency played a big role in implementing the United Nations Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance, which came into being as a result of Economic and Social Council resolution 222 (IX) approved by resolution 304 (IV) of the UN General Assembly of 1950.15 On the Expanded Programme, see The Structure of United Nations Economic-Aid to Underdeveloped Countries, Üner Kirdar (ed.), (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1966), 23 –63. Compared to the IIA, which focused on the collection and dissemination of information and knowledge, the FAO was thus directly involved in developmental work.16 Jachertz, ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics’.

The size of FAO operations quickly became correspondingly incomparable to the lean structure of the IIA. Significantly, besides the growing engagement in food relief, this meant a shift of focus away from trade to production. The progressive shrinking of the Economics Division and the rapid growth of the agriculture division between 1951 and 1958 testifies to this change in mission.17 Ralph Wesley Phillips, FAO: Its Organization and Work and United States Participation ([Washington, DC] : US Dept of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, 1964), 8–9. At the same time, concentrating on production also meant less emphasis was put on nutrition and agricultural welfare. Not only did the global concerns of the post-war era mark a dramatic change from the restricted circles of the IIA, dominated by the concerns of the agrarian elites of Europe, the USA and the British Empire. They also rapidly pushed aside the kind of grand Keynesian plans for economic management that were advocated by former imperial officials and politicians such as McDougall and Stanley Bruce, who was FAO chairman until 1951, in favour of more targeted interventions to raise farmers’ output.

Meanwhile, though, the United States began a massive programme of bilateral assistance based on Public Law 480 to dispose of their excess agricultural production and provide subsidised foodstuffs to developing countries. But P.L. 480 caused growing concerns in exporting countries that saw their exports of foodstuffs displaced by US dumping.18 The case of Canada was discussed in Jerome M. Stam, ‘The Effects of Public Law 480 on Canadian Wheat Exports’, American J. Agricultural Economics 46 (1964), 805–19. Nevertheless, others claimed that the effect of P.L. 480 had not been entirely negative for exporting countries, Brady J. Deaton, ‘Public Law 480: The Critical Choices’, American J. Agricultural Economics 62 (1980), 988–92. The World Food Programme was established in 1961 to ease these tensions and deal with the management of world agricultural surpluses on a multilateral basis, but separately from broader issues of international trade and economic conjuncture.19 Aaron D. Rietkerk, ‘“The Constructive Use of Abundance”: The UN World Food Programme and the Evolution of the International Food-Aid System during the Post-War Decades’, International History Review 38 (2016), 788–813. Initially, it managed $100 million in contributions, mostly in the form of commodities, from donor countries, thus absorbing but a fraction of the stocks of the EEC, Canada and the United States.20 World Food Programme, General Regulations, FAO Archives 16_WFP_FP1-1_V1_27101960-18121963_General Policy Matters. For the rest, the Cold War world saw the management of surpluses and deficits in foodstuffs essentially devolved to national or bloc policies (such as the Common Agricultural Policy of the EEC) or to the market, while development efforts concentrated on production increases, especially after the Green Revolution in South Asia during the 1960s. The result was a set of rather uncoordinated and inconsistent initiatives, which pursued contradictory goals of productivity growth, famine relief and surplus disposal.