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ICN2: Perpetuating a troubled legacy

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Abstract

To understand the constraints that limit the ability of the FAO and WHO to deal with the issue of hunger, it is important to revisit the discourses within the League of Nations Health Organisation, the precursor to the WHO, and the post-war emergence of FAO. The ‘marriage’ between nutrition and commerce brokered in these institutions helps explain why the world continues to be ‘awash in food’ even as millions die of hunger and suffer from malnutrition. The collaboration of the World Bank and the WTO in the ICN2 adds to the conflict of interest.

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Notes

  1. This became a very popular phrase as can be seen from its repeated use in several documents.

  2. The importance that nutrition gained could be seen from the number of publications of LNHO: 39 reports in 1936, 31 reports in 1937, 14 reports in 1938 and 16 reports in 1939 (Weindling, 1995). The British Medical Journal (1933) correspondent at Geneva remarked in a tongue-in-the cheek manner, ‘ [t]he documentation office of the League of Nations is the busiest place in Europe. Every delegate to the present Assembly received … some thirty documents, many of them voluminous, and these have been multiplying every day until the most conscientious delegate must despair of acquainting himself with even a fraction of them. The most melancholy of spectacles in the city by the lake is the waste-paper van drawn up outside the secretariat every morning’ (690).

  3. In 1810, Dr Ainslie listed ‘… 10 varieties of food grains, 45 … garden produce, 16 root crops, 62 kinds of fruits and nuts and nearly 50 “hot seeds”, herbs and oils’ in just one part of India (Arnold, 1994: 5). The diversity of plant life was remarked by Joseph Hooker “the flora of British India is more varied than that of any other country of equal area in the eastern hemisphere, if not the globe” (Sir Joseph Hooker as quoted in Vicziany, 1986: 659).

  4. Colonized countries were perceived as ‘scientific laborator[ies]’ and a ‘nutrition worker’s paradise’ (Arnold, 1994: 17).

  5. A short history of FAO, http://www.fao.org/UNFAO/histo-e.htm, accessed 25 May, 2010.

  6. Orr had proposed that a World Food Board be set up under the aegis of the FAO that would support farmers by buying when world prices fell and sell it to consumers when world prices rose (Passmore, 1980).

  7. ICN2 is being held in cooperation with the High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, IFAD, IFPRI, UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, WFP and WTO.

  8. Azevedo warns of ‘freezing effect’ on WTO work from impasse on Bali package, http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/spra_e/spra31_e.htm, accessed 23 September 2014.

  9. The National Food Security Act that ensures monthly provision of subsidized grains to targeted poor was passed in 2013 (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2013). The Act was the outcome of prolonged advocacy by Civil Society Organizations in India.

  10. The ‘Zero Hunger Challenge’ was launched in June 2012 by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with the aim to ‘eliminate hunger in our lifetimes’, http://www.un.org/en/zerohunger/.

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  1. Christina Sathyamala
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Additional information

With permission from the publishers and the editors, some excerpts taken from the chapter, Sathyamala, C (2014) ‘The political economy of dietary allowances’ in Raghbendra Jha, Ragghav Gaiha and Anil B. Deolalikar (eds) Handbook on Food: Demand, Supply, Sustainability and Security, pp 260-277, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Revisits the precursor to the WHO and the post-war emergence of FAO and the ‘marriage’ between nutrition and commerce brokered within these institutions

The LNHO had been set up in 1921 as part of the LN in response to the typhus and relapsing fever epidemics that had spread from Russia to Poland and was threatening to engulf Europe (The Canadian Medical Association Journal, 1924).

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Sathyamala, C. ICN2: Perpetuating a troubled legacy. Development 57, 171–178 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2014.67

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