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Private capital was short, that said, and access to technology limited. This required extensive public financing schemes, particularly in less developed countries. Although by far the greater share of investment came from domestic resources, international and foreign funding was crucial in some areas of acute need, such as the purchase of imported equipment.

Credit expanded dramatically – even if in parts of the world, excessive interest rates put it beyond the reach of many small farmers. (A decade after the end of the Second World War, some 90 percent of agricultural credit in India was still being supplied by moneylenders, generally at high interest rates.) By the 1950s, in South and East Asia in particular, a slew of legislative reforms was dismantling institutional barriers to the efficient use of land by transferring ownership to cultivators and encouraging the consolidation of fragmented holdings. There was broad progress towards the formal registration of titles. Various countries also rationalized their agricultural taxation systems.

Parts of what would come to be known as the developing world improved their use and management of water, with progress most notable in Thailand and in newly independent India and Pakistan. Many other countries undertook the first systematic surveys of their water resources. Irrigation schemes took off.

The Soviet Union and China, which had collectivized agriculture or were busy doing so, were also reporting progress on administering water resources and other aspects of farming. By the 1950s, however, the Korean War and the Cold War had corroded much of the spirit of cooperation of the very early post-war era. In the process, the flow of information between rival powers had dwindled. Poorer nations, meanwhile, lacked comprehensive reporting capacities.

Gaps in the data notwithstanding, there was evidence of significant agricultural advancement across much of the globe. By the mid-1950s, there had been a conspicuous leap in the prevalence of agricultural machinery. The number of registered tractors went up threefold, releasing for cultivation vast expanses of land previously used to grow feed for traction animals.

Plant breeding too underwent considerable development. In parts of Europe, hybrid maize was greatly boosting yields. Developing nations saw the productivity of basic crops soar thanks to new synthetic pesticides and selective weedkillers. By the 1960s, improved, high-yielding varieties of rice, as well as new strains, had spread across Asia. The continent is seen as having reaped the biggest rewards from the Green Revolution: over thirty years or so, high-yielding varieties of rice came to comprise two-thirds of all plantings, while nearly 90 percent of wheat fields were planted with modern varieties.

From the 1950s onwards, livestock and animal husbandry benefited from the more systematic registration of herds and the spread of artificial insemination. Poorer nations set up state veterinary services. Europe, North America and Oceania witnessed big jumps in yields per hectare per animal.

Overall, within a decade of FAO’s creation, food production was a quarter greater than at the end of the war, and higher also in per capita terms.

Even so, progress was far from even, sufficient or irreversible. On the whole, agricultural expansion, solid as it was, was dwarfed by the scale of growth in the industrial sector, the main engine of post-war prosperity in Western nations. Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, had failed to make the most of the Green Revolution: capital in the region was scarce; landownership largely informal; agricultural inputs basic; and access to credit and technology limited. For decades to come, the region would remain the focus of international development efforts.

Throughout the first two decades of FAO’s existence, the fragility of agricultural supply chains and the persistent difficulty in securing universal access to food (even in nations that had largely benefited from the Green Revolution) were sharply illustrated by sudden-onset crises, both human-caused and natural.

The earthquake that struck Buin Zahra in the northern area of Iran (now the Islamic Republic of) on 1 September 1962 killed more than 12 000 people. Cataclysmic in human terms, the tremor was also a trial by fire for the new humanitarian organization, the World Food Programme (WFP). The body, founded as a joint UN–FAO undertaking less than a year earlier, quickly mobilized to deliver 1 500 tonnes of wheat, 270 tonnes of sugar and 27 tonnes of tea. In the decades since, WFP has shaped up as the world’s largest humanitarian structure, providing food assistance in half of all nations.

Between 1945 and well into the 1960s, agricultural production grew uninterruptedly. Yet the world also learned that while more food was essential to prevent starvation, even enough food was not, on its own, enough to end hunger. Throughout the period, in fact, ending hunger remained within dreaming distance: President Roosevelt’s fourth freedom lay in an ever-shifting “beyond the hills”, along a path that was never straight, rarely open to all, and frequently blocked by the debris of conflict, the legacy of injustice and the weight of neglect.