DEPOSITED BY THE "The Toasted Breadcrumbs of the Future" by Harlan Cleveland Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs1 Tonight each of us consumed at these tables as much nourishment as is eaten in a day and a half by more than 50 percent of the people of the world. If we were suddenly to join that less fortunate half of the human race, our next meal would be a late lunch on Wednesday. And our menu on that occasion would be one small bowl of cooked rice and perhaps a piece of fish about 1-inch square. You and I wouldn't stand for such treatment. Neither will the world's hungry people-at least not for long. And that is why, 20 years ago today, men and women from 44 countries, exhausted but exhilarated, met in their final plenary session at a mineral water spa in Hot Springs, Virginia, to approve the Final Act of an historic meeting. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had set the tone for their labors in his message to the conference: 2 We know that each freedom is dependent upon the others: that freedom from fear, for example, can 1 Address made at a commemorative dinner in honor of the 20th anniversary of the founding of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, at Washington, D.C., on June 3 (press release 296). *For text, see BULLETIN of May 22, 1943, p. 455. [The be al not be secured without freedom from want. nations] must see to it that no hindrances lowed to prevent any nation or group of citizens within a nation from obtaining the food necessary for health. . . . In this and other United Nations conferences we shall be extending our collaboration. Only by working together can we learn to work together, and work together we must and will. The short history of how we started to work together, in the midst of a great war, is worth this moment of commemoration. Each nation represented at Hot Springs has its own story of how it got there. Let me tell you the story as it looked from Washington at the time. Early Planning for Postwar Cooperation Franklin Roosevelt was mindful of the strictures of John Maynard Keynes that the failure of Versailles and the League of Nations was due to the lack of concrete "ideas . . . for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which [Woodrow Wilson] had thundered from the White House." So a group of planners under Leo Pasvolsky, a special adviser to the Secretary of State, actually began postwar planning as early as the autumn of 1939. But President Roosevelt early developed the principle-which he practiced but never preached-that an ultimate pattern of peace must be put together over a period of time out of its major fragments. It was too much, he seemed to feel, to build a peace all at once, in a single stroke of diplomacy, from such a ruin as the Second World War might make of the world. So in the early months of postwar planning the planning was in bits and pieces, reaching into every specialized corner of the Government. The dynamics of specialist enthusiasm would be used to provide motive power for building the peace-out of building blocks which would take the form of international organizations for special as well as general purposes, for technical as well as political functions. Thus, over in the Treasury Department, the first planning papers that were to lead to the Bretton Woods Conference, and later the World Bank and Monetary Fund, were drafted early in the war. Across town in the Public Health Service, doctors dreamed of a world health organization. Elsewhere university people began talking about a world education agency. The labor movement worked hard to preserve the International Labor Organization, temporarily exiled from Geneva to Montreal. And the forecasters of weather, already organized for almost 70 years in an international organization, began the rethinking that found expression in the World Meteorological Organization. And, as a neophyte in Government employed in the Department of Agriculture, I remember working on postwar food planning in 1941, several months before the United States was actually engaged in fighting the war we assumed from the first would be won. But the idea that food would have to play a central part in the building of the peace, and that in a peaceful world every citizen should have enough of it, was not confined to Washington. In wartime London was Stanley Bruce, a former Prime Minister of Australia and Australia's representative in the War Cabinet. With him was F. L. McDougall, son of a onetime Lord Mayor of London, who had gone to Australia, experienced a hard time as a farmer, joined Bruce in the League of Nations, and developed a crusading zeal for a global attack on hunger. In the midthirties, when the League of Nations as a political organization was already on its last legs, Bruce and McDougall were hobnobbing with John Boyd Orr of Scotland and others, promoting an international marriage between health and agriculture-and borrowing words from the 16th-century heretic, Hugh Latimer, to describe their efforts. After one eloquent outburst in the League Assembly, Bruce wrote to Orr that "we have this day lighted such a candle, by God's grace, in Geneva as we trust shall never be put out." John Winant was in wartime London also as American Ambassador, his shy manner and curiously formal handshake obscuring a passion for people and a hatred of poverty. Shuttling back and forth across the ocean was Paul Appleby, newspaper editor and Under Secretary of Agriculture, later to become a philosopher of public administration—and our guest tonight. Earlier talks in London about an international wheat agreement led to further talk of a broader food organization; and in the cold of wartime London the Hot Springs Conference was conceived. The scene shifts now to Washington, where Winant, according to one story, had sold the idea to President Roosevelt. Another version, that of Gove Hambidge in The Story of FAO, is that McDougall sold it to Mrs. Roosevelt, who in turn sold it to Mr. Roosevelt. (That there should be conflicting claims to the parentage of a successful idea is not surprising. I personally know 5 people who invented the Marshall Plan and 17 people who first thought of Point 4.) In any event, if Mrs. Roosevelt was the effective courier, it was not the first-or the last-time that she put a bee in the President's bonnet. But whoever sold him the idea of a world food conference, the President bought it as the first fragment of a still obscure pattern of peace. And on March 19, 1943, the President announced in a press conference that the United States would host a meeting to "deal with longrange problems of the nutritional standards of all countries." The Conference at Hot Springs It is worth remembering that in 1943 it was a much more exotic idea to have a world conference than it is today. During the 19th century our own nation participated in an average of hardly more than one international conference per year. Our career as a nation of conference-goers started in 1826, when a youthful United States, preoccupied with its own internal development, took a wary look at its first invitation-from Simón Bolívar to attend the Panama congress of American states. This meeting is generally counted as the beginning of our international conference program, but in fact the U.S. delegates were not confirmed by a suspicious Senate in time to take part in the sessions. Nowadays Congress and the rest of us take international conferences as part of a familiar landscape. We are attending about 450 of them this year on almost every imaginable subject from atomic energy to zinc. In the last 26 months the United States Government has participated in as many international conferences as we attended in our entire history from the founding of the Republic in 1789 to the Hot Springs Conference in 1943. Few had been more important than that one, and I am confident that few will be more important than the World Food Congress that starts here tomorrow morning. |