Feeding the Hungry

Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight against Hunger

Michelle Jurkovich

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501751172
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. In Feeding the Hungry, Michelle Jurkovich examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem. Drawing on interviews with staff at top international anti-hunger organizations as well as archival research at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the UK National Archives, and the U.S. National Archives, Jurkovich provides a new analytic model of transnational advocacy.

In investigating advocacy around a critical economic and social right—the right to food—Jurkovich challenges existing understandings of the relationships among human rights, norms, and laws. Most important, Feeding the Hungry provides an expanded conceptual tool kit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.

1

PUTTING HUNGER ON THE AGENDA

Hunger has always been a condition of humankind. It has only comparatively recently become a problem and more recently still a violation of a human right. For much of human history, hunger was understood as an inevitable feature of the natural landscape.¹ It was an expected outcome of a growing population where simple science, mathematics, and logic determined it was simply impossible to feed everyone.² In this sense, one would no more lament the ubiquity of hunger in the world than one would lament death itself. Hunger was simply unavoidable.

Not only was hunger not a problem for which societies or governments were obliged to look for a solution, but the use of food as a weapon was accepted military strategy. Siege tactics, despite resulting in the deliberate starvation of children, were expected practice. Even in times of peace, people were not universally entitled to food, even if it surrounded them in abundance. An individual’s claim to food was rooted in their ability to command that food from the market, or through their own land and labor at home.

Hunger evolved into a problem only when its existence could no longer be seen as natural and inevitable—and, as such, unsolvable. Problems require solutions, or at least attempts at solutions. Conditions need no such thing. Moreover, conditions become problems only when the issue is made problematic to some actor, such that they should choose to invest energy in working toward its remedy. While historians such as James Vernon in his Hunger: A Modern History have already documented the evolution of understandings of hunger up until the 1940s,³ much of the groundwork for modern international approaches to hunger were not established until the final years of World War II and its immediate aftermath.

This chapter serves to document how responding to global hunger was put on the political agenda as a problem to be solved; the chapter also serves to identify key changes (and conversely, that which has been most immune to change) in how the international community has addressed the problem. It would be impossible to do justice to all aspects of change in how hunger was addressed in one chapter. The more modest aim herein is to highlight only that which is essential to understanding the contemporary international anti-hunger advocacy discussed in the remainder of the book, bringing front and center the process of putting hunger on the political agenda in the mid-1940s and, importantly, constructing the human right to food. This chapter relies on archival research conducted at the archives of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) in Rome, as well as at the UK and U.S. National Archives.

Putting Hunger on the Political Agenda

At the time that the United States called for the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture (known as the Hot Springs Conference, as it was convened in Hot Springs, Virginia), the United States had no domestic food stamps program. Briefly, during the Great Depression, it had a temporary and limited food stamps program, but it was never envisioned as a permanent program and was disbanded in March 1943, a few months before the Hot Springs Conference was held.⁴

Looking back, then, it seems odd that the United States would have been the country to call for an international conference to address global hunger and malnutrition. It is important to note that at this point in time, there were no formal international treaties or conventions governing international approaches to hunger, and domestic food assistance programs in many countries were limited. The League of Nations had established its Nutrition Committee in the mid-1930s, which had begun to discuss how malnutrition could in fact be solvable—namely, with “the application of science to agriculture” which “would provide all food required by diets adequate for health.” The committee had concluded optimistically that malnutrition provided “an opportunity to eradicate a social evil by methods which will increase economic prosperity.”⁵ The outbreak of World War II, however, cut short the League of Nations and its efforts on this front.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was unable to attend the Hot Springs Conference, but Judge Marvin Jones, the chair of the American delegation, read aloud from a letter Roosevelt had provided, explaining his absence and the importance of the theme of the conference. “Society must meet in full its obligation to make available to all its members at least the minimum adequate nutrition,” wrote Roosevelt, which again was a bit perplexing to assert just months after the U.S. food stamps program had been disbanded. Nonetheless, he implored participants to take seriously the work of the conference, as “the problems with which this conference will concern itself are the most fundamental of all human problems—for without food and clothing life itself is impossible.”⁶ The New York Times noted that the conference agenda would engage with “such basic problems as the causes and consequences of malnutrition, how more and better food can be produced throughout the world and how it can be distributed to improve living standards in low-wage areas.”⁷ All forty-three countries who were invited accepted the invitation to attend,⁸ including China, whose delegate Kuo Ping-Wen chaired the section titled “Consumption Levels and Requirements”; the USSR, whose delegate A. D. Krutiko chaired the section “Expansion of Production and Adaptation to Consumption Needs”; Brazil, whose delegate José Geribaldi Dantas chaired the section “Facilitation and Improvement of Distribution”; and Cuba, whose delegate served as vice chairman of the section “Recommendations for Continuing and Carrying Forward the Work of the Conference” under chairman Richard Law of the United Kingdom.⁹

When the United Kingdom received its invitation to the Hot Springs Conference, it was concerned. Such a conference was “unexpected,”¹⁰ and Britain worried that the United States would use this conference to propose policies favorable to agricultural exporting states (generally at odds with Britain’s interests as a net food importer). Indeed, officials at the UK Ministry of Food worried that it would be “a producers Conference, in which again we shall have to play the part of unwilling partner.”¹¹ The United Kingdom noted that it would be “the only large importing country represented at the conference, and … our own interests and those of the Dominions are likely to be somewhat divergent.”¹² As such, the “tactical implications” of the conference were challenging, as it “might do little more than advertise a fundamental cleavage between in [sic] the interests of the exporting countries and the farmers of the importing countries.”¹³ Special care was to be taken by the UK delegation to ensure that such sensitive topics as wheat and cotton schemes were not addressed,¹⁴ though W. F. Crick of the Ministry of Food expressed concern that that the United Kingdom had already acquired the reputation of “stonewalling” and “non-co-operativeness” (put even more bluntly, as the “bad boy of the party”). “For Heaven’s sake,” wrote Crick to J. P. R. Maud, UK delegate to the conference, “abandon the aggrieved, supercilious or alarmist attitude.… Above all, suppress the cynicism which would describe the project as (I quote one of the Treasury representatives at Wednesday’s meeting) ‘this most ridiculous of all Conferences.’ ”¹⁵

Internal U.S. documents suggest they may not have been far off in their assessment of some of what might have motivated the United States to feign concern at global hunger, though the U.S. interest was not solely based in economic calculations.¹⁶ Interestingly, the United States had determined that food could be a significant weapon of “psychological warfare” such that a conference around this theme should make up the first of the United Nations conferences.¹⁷

The link between food and psychological warfare was months in the making. Frank McDougall, an Australian delegate at the Hot Springs Conference, had invested considerable energy in convincing U.S. policy makers during his 1942 visit to Washington that, in order to make “progress in the war of ideas,” the issue of food and agriculture must be placed front and center of U.S. efforts at psychological warfare.¹⁸ “This winter,” wrote McDougall, “men’s minds everywhere will be concerned with food. This will be the time for the United Nations to present to the world the picture of how they propose, on the food front, to secure ‘Freedom from want, everywhere in the world.’ ” The United States needed to be engaging not only in a physical war with Axis powers, but “our military offensive must be paralleled by our assuming the psychological offensive. Thus far, we have mainly been on the defensive—hating Hitler, despising Mussolini, loathing the Japanese war-lords. The President’s Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter have given us sound bases from which to organize our psychological offensive but we have not yet turned these general statements into weapons in the war of ideas.”¹⁹

If the United States could show how it would address the very pressing reality of hunger, it could more viably present itself as a potential leader of the new world order. McDougall shared his ideas (and earlier drafts of his “Progress in the War of Ideas”) throughout the American political elite, meeting with President Roosevelt, Vice President Henry A. Wallace, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as being asked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to help organize a “draft program for action on food and agriculture.”²⁰ By the time the Hot Springs Conference was organized, the United States had determined that food and agriculture “would provide the best basis for United Nations psychological warfare.”²¹

And thus the first international conference of the United Nations came to be called around the issue of food and hunger. The relationship between freedom from hunger and President Roosevelt’s “freedom from want” served as an overarching theme to the Hot Springs Conference. In summarizing the conference, the secretary-general’s report noted, “The Conference declared that the goal of freedom from want can be reached. It di...