Deeper

With expectations of linear progress crumbling, established production and consumption models are being challenged. In the West, certainly rich but economically battered, an environmental consciousness is awakening. Greener sensitivities are gaining a voice – in society and culture at first, then in politics. In 1962 already, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had detailed the damages wrought on the environment and human health by the rampant use of pesticides. A rallying cry for the nascent environmental movement, the book laid the premises for the American ban on dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in 1972; it would go on to influence opinion and public policy in the United States for years to come.

“We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further,” India’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, conceded at a conference in Stockholm in 1972, articulating what was shaping up ideologically as a dilemma and policy-wise as a trade-off. “And yet,” she continued, “we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?”

Over the following decades, conservation concerns would transform humanity’s understanding of its relationship to nature. Between the 1970s and the 1980s, societies and policymakers acquire a sense of the finite character of the planet’s resources. The search is on for less exploitative ways to deliver socially desirable objectives – among them, an end to hunger.

The oceans and seas focus attention: they are a source of vital nourishment for hundreds of millions. For many others, they equal livelihoods. They also sustain vast fishing industries, and entire coastal and island economies. Around the mid-1970s, fish production begins to level off as disputes flare over exclusive fishing areas and disquiet rumbles over stocks. Addressing an FAO event on the subject in 1984, King Juan Carlos of Spain speaks of the necessity to ensure that “the riches of the sea should not be exhausted in a predatory, short-sighted and selfish endeavour”. That same year, long-term goals for fisheries are agreed.

In most respects, that said, this second phase of FAO’s existence is an era of quick-shifting perceptions but slower-shifting practices. The pursuit of volume and yields continues to drive mainstream approaches to agricultural development. All the same, the race to end hunger no longer proceeds in a contextual void: it accrues layers of environmental and social nuance.

The cyclical, systemic nature of hunger is underscored by desertification and droughts, food crises and famines. In seeking to break the cycle, inequality is perceived as both moral scandal and policy impediment. Securing access to food – and not just its theoretical availability – starts to inform the discourse of FAO and sister organizations.

But for access to food to improve, it is now thought that a host of other human and social needs must be addressed – education, health, a clean and safe environment, and arguably peace. Nor are these just needs: they begin to be forcefully articulated as rights. Coming into force in 1976, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights enshrines the right to food – a right since constitutionalized in India and a host of other countries. (In more recent years, various nations have incorporated the right to food in their constitutions or made it “justiciable”, that is, enforceable in court.)

These years see FAO partly transition from technical cooperation body to international development agency. The evolution stems from an understanding that narrowly defined, quantitative-minded interpretations of the Organization’s mandate no longer suffice. The logic of more shades off into the logic of deeper. Technical support to centralized irrigation schemes, for example, loses favour to community-centred programmes that come closer to local realities: these are seen as less wasteful, quicker to set up, more immediately useful and likelier to build resilience.

The new concept of food security, which integrates the principles of availability and access, receives formal recognition in the mid-1970s with the foundation of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). A UN body whose Secretariat is hosted by FAO, the CFS was designed with the lessons of the oil crisis in mind: the aim was to head off the kind of food shortages and price volatility of recent memory. Growing in stature through the 1980s, the CFS was reformed in the late 2000s to include civic movements and private sector actors, alongside government officials and experts. It is, to date, the world’s most inclusive platform for discussing solutions to global hunger and ways to improve nutrition. (Reflecting these long-maturing shifts in approaches to international development, FAO itself has since evolved strategies for engagement with civil society and the private sector.)

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, meanwhile, mass communications favour the emergence of a public-facing, rather than merely diplomatic and technocratic, discourse about food as a global concern. World Food Day, marking the foundation of FAO on 16 October, is celebrated for the first time in 1981: it has since become a fixture in the global calendar, promoted ever more visibly in cities around the world.