International Organizations and Rural Development: The FAO Perspective

This epilogue reflects on the findings of the articles collected in this section and discusses their contributions to the history of international organizations and rural development.     

A Global Journey – Ancel Keys,the FAO,and the Rise of Transnational Heart Disease Epidemiology, 1949–1958

Few people have influenced western eating patterns in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as much as physiologist and epidemiologist Ancel Keys (1904–2004). Keys not only developed the K Ration for the United States military, but also advocated for diets that lowered blood cholesterol and famously discovered the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet in the 1950s and 1960s. Keys’ interest in the Mediterranean diet arose from his service on the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)-World Health Organization (WHO) Joint Expert Committee on Nutrition, which allowed him to explore nutritional status, dietary habits, and regional eating patterns across the globe. This paper examines how Keys’ service as chair of the UN FAO Committee on Caloric Requirements and the UN FAO Expert Committee on Nutrition led him to think globally about the relationship between diet and cardiovascular health, and to launch the first international comparative epidemiological study of diet and heart disease, the Seven Countries Study.     

‘The Claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the Age of Ambivalent Internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.     

Transnational Development on the Frontier: The FAO's Fishery and Forestry Missions in the Brazilian Amazon

In the early 1950s, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) organized a mission to the Brazilian Amazon Valley to assess development needs and help implement a development plan. The Brazilian government saw this as part of an initiative to integrate a sparsely populated and ‘backward’ region more firmly into the nation. The FAO's local partner was the Superintendancy for the Plan of Economic Valorization of the Amazon (SPVEA), a regional development agency created in 1953. This article analyzes the operation of the Mission, specifically its fishery and forestry sections, to understand the dynamics of transnational development cooperation. The mission eventually failed because the Brazilian state never offered sufficient support on FAO terms; SPVEA never acquired the necessary financial resources, administrative capacity and technical expertise. The FAO experts recognized the problems, but had no means to enhance the resources or change the approach of the local partner. The government's decision, in the late 1950s, to prioritize the building of a major road from Brasília to Belém, aggravated the lack of resources for the Mission's work. Importantly, the failure was not a question of ideological resistance to foreign meddling or a fundamental opposition to the FAO development strategy.     

From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955

This paper examines the early years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its conceptualization of ‘rural welfare’, an approach that foresaw the modernization of agricultural societies and the alleviation of poverty through improvements in labor, housing, health, education of people working in agriculture. Based on the correspondence of FAO officials and experts, the paper shows how in the late 1940s, the Rural Welfare Division, under the leadership of its Director Horace Belshaw, promoted a low-modernist and local-sensitive approach to rural development that emphasized the subjectivity of welfare and that was skeptical of top-down development programs. As the paper argues, Belshaw's holistic understanding of rural communities was abandoned in the early 1950s in favor of an increasingly technical development consultancy, characterized by short-term interventions rather than by an intellectual and scientific debate about the larger implications of development.     

FAO from the Field and from Below: Emma Reh and the Challenges of Doing Nutrition Work in Central America

While much of the historical literature on FAO has adopted a headquarter perspective, this article examines FAO's nutrition activities in Central America from the vantage point of a field worker stationed in the region during the 1950s. Emma Reh's professional background broadens our understanding of the careers of staff members in international organizations and makes visible the connections between the US Indian Bureau and development work. Correspondence and field reports shed light on FAO's difficulties in establishing a strong presence in Central America. Moreover, the article shows that dietary surveys with their socio-economic perspectives on nutrition were underfunded as well as marginalized in the processes of knowledge production and diffusion while a medicalized approach to nutrition took hold at the FAO Nutrition Division. In the early1960s, the FAO Nutrition Division returned to a less reductive view on nutrition.     

Revisiting the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): International Histories of Agriculture,Nutrition,and Development

As far as international organizations and their written histories are concerned, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, presents quite a paradox. Though in its early years, the organization itself as well as individual staff members were determined to document and narrate FAO's history, sixty years later many aspects of FAO's history remain largely unknown. The following articles re-examine the history of FAO through a range of new perspectives that shed light on the intellectual roots of rural development ideas within the organization and illuminate the context of specific development missions, as well as the transnational flows of knowledge and expertise.