Broader

The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 seals this epochal shift. By the early 1990s, nations born or reborn out of the USSR have joined international organizations, including FAO, as sovereign members.

The European single market comes into being, then the World Trade Organization. A wave of liberalization sweeps the planet. Commercial barriers are dismantled. But increasingly globalized exchanges translate into increasingly globalized food safety concerns. An outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (or “mad cow disease”) in British herds is linked to the incidence of the degenerative neurological condition Creutzfeldt-Jakob among beef consumers: the episode shines a disturbing light on the continuum between human and animal health. Drawing on FAO’s expertise in combating livestock diseases, the Codex Alimentarius tackles the fraught question of animal feed – a further layer of complexity in the effort to secure safe, sufficient and nutritious food for all.

The mid-1990s find FAO an unquestionably more sophisticated outfit in terms of its breadth of knowledge and statistical prowess. Born as a stately norm-issuing agency, long unrivalled as a supplier of agricultural expertise, it must adapt to an era of deregulation. Agricultural initiative and standard-setting power have by now largely passed to the private sector. Governments themselves, particularly in countries in transition, are increasingly looking to think-tanks and independent foundations for policy advice; and, as crisis follows crisis, the capacity for quick public and political mobilization is ever more the domain of global NGOs.

Even so, the United Nations continues to shape the global development debate. A new paradigm emerges, in which multiple strands of environmental, human rights and global health discourse converge. To this, FAO and other partners contribute a muscular food security component. On the ground, however, development remains a lopsided affair; and even what has been understood by development is, in some ways, being called into question.

By the 1990s, the model of industrial agriculture in much of North America and Europe had generated quantities of food unimaginable at the time of FAO’s foundation. Agribusiness consolidation and mountains of surpluses; animals fed and bred for ever greater yields; the spread of monocultures; the rise of ultraprocessed foods – all testified to production modes and supply chains that filled supermarket carts but paid less heed to resource conservation, environmental concerns or nutritional balance. In much of the developing world, soils were eroding. Deserts expanded, forests receded. Wild habitats shrank. Agriculture remained cash-starved, essential needs unmet. Hunger and malnutrition still maimed lives in their hundreds of millions.

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In 1996, Pope John Paul II told a World Food Summit convened by FAO that the persistent contrast between indigence and opulence was “unbearable to humanity”. A year later, FAO launched its TeleFood fundraising campaign, financing farming projects in over 100 nations. (Ten years on, in 2007, an evaluation would find the programme had put more than USD 14 million in farmers’ hands, though not always benefiting the poorest countries or the poorest farmers in the targeted communities; it recommended folding TeleFood into wider advocacy efforts, with a more systemic approach to the underlying causes of hunger. In this, the review could be said to echo some of the criticism of the Live Aid campaign: worthy, but taking aim at the symptom rather than the disease.)

As the world stepped into a new millennium, further dimensions and liabilities were coming to the fore. Among them – a legacy of gender inequality, amid evidence that food insecurity hits women and girls harder (FAO was by now into its second six-year “Women in Development” plan of action); the loss of biodiversity, which jeopardizes the food sources of impoverished communities; the plight of Indigenous Peoples, often marginalized, their unique agricultural knowledge at risk; and the extent to which strong institutions help keep hunger at bay.

Developing nations chasing GDP growth as a fast track to progress found that food insecurity came at a price. Studies published since have shown African countries forfeiting up to 16 percent of annual output as child malnutrition curbed educational attainment, reduced workplace longevity, dented productivity and drained public health systems.

In short, the international community concluded that to cure one ill, you had to tackle many. The job of human development could be divided into tasks, but it would succeed or fail as a whole; all levers must be pressed at once. Nor could development continue to be simply a top-down affair, from rich to poor: developing nations – the larger ones especially – had often acquired precious experience to share. In some cases, this could amount to a global record of excellence, whether China’s agricultural expertise or Brazil’s school meals programme. (Known as South–South and triangular cooperation, this system of horizontal training and information exchange between developing nations has a long history at FAO, but has seen particular growth since 2019.)