6.4 Conclusions
This chapter has aimed to show a double shift in the priorities and actors of international collaboration in food and agriculture. As embodied by the League of Nations and the IIA, pre-war international collaboration in agriculture focused on trade in commodities and the protection of the farmers’ income on both sides of the Atlantic. International markets of agricultural commodities made for the primary object of diplomatic discussions, since international trade had been an obvious issue of international negotiations. This tendency became even more pronounced when ‘managed’ trade came to dominate commodity flows in the inter-war period through quotas and bilateral agreements. The Wheat Conferences held during the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, reiterated the need for an international regulation of trade issues.
1 Way, A New Idea Each Morning. The Great Depression led to a new approach to interdependencies and officials from the British Empire, such as Bruce or McDougall, were extremely innovative and ambitious in their proposals for a new systematic management of world imbalances. Coupling trade policies with the new science of nutrition, they proposed to invert the paradigm of international agricultural collaboration and base it on food needs rather than income protection.
The marginalisation of continental European traditional agrarian elites in the international negotiations held in the USA and Canada during the Second World War opened a (narrow) window of opportunity for plans of systemic regulation led by the USA and the UK. The project of an International Trade Organisation, and the World Food Board plan that Orr failed to push through because of the opposition of several governments, including the USA and the UK, shared an emphasis on the intentional governance of markets, although the International Trade Organisation was meant to encompass all products and the World Food Board introduced a separate organisation for agriculture, based on the exceptional importance of nutrition. Yet, these ideas were never implemented. In fact, the operations of the FAO in the post-war period concentrated primarily on technical assistance and eventually famine relief through the World Food Programme of the United Nations. These activities closely reflected the priorities of the development policy of the US government.
While trade negotiations continued in the Genevan General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the long-term concerns of European agrarian organisations with income support (a goal that had shaped the debates at the League of Nations and the IIA during the inter-war period) led to the proposal of the European Green Pool and eventually to the establishment of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Economic Community. In most OECD countries, the defence of price stability and farmers’ income became the guiding principle of national or regional agricultural policies. Although part of the structural surplus that income subsidies created was absorbed by food relief programmes, part of it was dumped onto developing countries, thus undermining the purpose of technical assistance programmes of UN agencies and other development actors. The wreck of the technocratic hopes of the 1930s and 1940s, in fact, left only regional and national policies to address market regulation and made the world possibly more vulnerable to the crisis of the 1970s.