Introduction

Agriculture was, by and large, ravaged. Across swathes of the globe, food production had shrunk – by up to a third in Europe, in the countries that formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and in North Africa, and by a tenth in East Asia. The world population had meanwhile swollen by a tenth. This made for an overall drop in per capita farm output of 15 percent from pre-war years. Demographers offered little succour: projections suggested a further, imminent surge in the number of mouths to feed. And indeed, by 1955 the population of Latin America – to take just one example – had grown by almost 50 percent compared to pre-war levels.

From vision to home

Even as much of the world struggled to feed itself, bold new words were outlining new horizons. Already in 1941, in a speech that would inspire the foundational principles of the United Nations, the President of the United States of America, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had listed freedom from want among his “Four Freedoms”. He defined it as “economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants, everywhere in the world”.

In a landscape of desolation, North America stood out. The United States homeland had been spared direct conflict: agricultural production had continued to rise, recovering from the crisis of 1929 and the early 1930s. The intellectual drive which led to the creation of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) originated there.

The end of the Second World War provided the impetus. Yet the concept of what would become FAO – the idea of a congress with a mission to spread agricultural expertise and improve the lot of farmers across nations – pre-dated the war. The institutional seed had been planted as early as 1905 by one visionary American, David Lubin. His initiative, which garnered little notice at home, proved persuasive with the Italian royal court.

On 16 October 1945, meeting at the emblematic Château Frontenac in Quebec City, 34 governments signed the Constitution for a permanent organization in the field of food and agriculture. Two weeks later, by the end of this first Conference on Food and Agriculture, membership exceeded 40. FAO’s creation technically pre-dates that of the United Nations itself, which would not come into being for another eight days. (The United Nations Charter had been signed the previous June in San Francisco, United States of America, but had yet to meet the threshold for ratification.) The Organization’s Constitution established it as a collaborative body, with a wide mandate to further agricultural knowledge and nutritional well-being. The first Director-General was the Scottish biologist, nutritionist and peace advocate John Boyd Orr. A year after leaving FAO in 1949, Boyd Orr was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Initially located in Washington, DC, FAO headquarters was then transferred to Rome, home of the IIA, in recognition of Italy’s record of pioneering food-related international cooperation. Come 1951, the Organization would take up residency in a building repurposed from its initial destination as the colonial-era Ministry of Italian Africa. Bridging the space between two ancient sites, the Baths of Caracalla and the Circus Maximus, the Palazzo FAO, designed along rationalist principles and extended with elements of post-war international style, is among the more architecturally significant premises of United Nations (UN) agencies.