The conference at Hot Springs in 1943 was attended by some of those who had taken part in the League of Nations work and debates on nutrition and food security. They discussed the League’s work with both President Roosevelt and Vice-President Henry Wallace, and suggested that as food was, in Roosevelt’s language, ‘the first want of man’, a world food policy would be the best way to begin to fulfil the promise of freedom from want for all people that was previously made in the Atlantic Charter, signed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in August 1941. Out of this historical background emerged FAO. Of all the personalities involved, Frank McDougall is especially linked with the founding of FAO (Boerma, 1968; Phillips, 1981). Born in the United Kingdom, he became a fruit grower in Australia and then economic adviser to Lord Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner in London. MacDougall had shown a keen interest in the work of Boyd Orr on human nutrition and had frequently visited his research institute in Scotland, and had kept Lord Bruce informed. He was enormously impressed by the new knowledge of nutrition that developed between the two world wars. He was equally impressed by the paradox of the emergence of food surpluses during the depression of the 1930s alongside hunger and malnutrition not only in the developing countries but also among the unemployed, children and old people in the most economically advanced countries. His conviction that these two ‘evils’ should cancel each other out was crystallized in his phrase ‘the marriage of food and agriculture’. He succeeded in inducing the League of Nations to set up an international committee on nutrition. He wrote a memorandum on The Agricultural and Health Problem in 1935, which served as a first step towards bringing before the League the findings of nutritionists indicating that a large proprtion of the world’s population did not get enough of the right sort of food, and the view that food production should be expanded to meet nutritional requirements, rather than restricted (Phillips, 1981). But his greatest success was when he sold the idea of an international agency to combat hunger to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which led to the Hot Springs conference.
World Food Problem in Global Political Context: Towards a Universal Food Policy
