Food and Agriculture Organization

• 1. Introduction

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  "Fiat panis" - let there be bread. Those two Latin words are the motto of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and they carry the weight of a mission that has occupied diplomats, scientists, and farmers since the final months of World War II. On the 16th of October 1945, in Quebec City, Canada, the FAO came into existence. Its founding session opened that same day at the Château Frontenac, a hotel that would host the first deliberations of an institution now operating in over 130 countries. How did a loose idea floated in the late 19th century become one of the largest agencies the United Nations would ever produce? And why, even as it generated billions in budgets and assembled 195 members, has the FAO spent decades fending off accusations of bureaucratic failure?

• 2. Seeds of an Idea

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  David Lubin, a Polish-born American agriculturalist and activist, was among the first to push seriously for an international body dedicated to farming. His advocacy, combined with diplomatic momentum in the early 20th century, led to an international conference held in Rome in May and June of 1905. That gathering produced the International Institute of Agriculture, created by Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III. The IIA became the first intergovernmental organization to tackle agricultural problems at a global scale. Its work was methodical rather than dramatic: collecting output statistics, cataloguing crop diseases, and in 1930 publishing the first agricultural census of its kind. World War II effectively ended the IIA before the FAO had even been formally conceived. In 1943, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened a League of Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture. Forty-four governments sent representatives to The Omni Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, from the 18th of May to the 3rd of June. The driving force behind that gathering was Frank L. McDougall, a British-born Australian economist who had been arguing since 1935 for an international forum to confront hunger and malnutrition. The Hot Springs Conference ended with a commitment to create a permanent body - and two years later, that commitment was honored. The IIA was formally dissolved by its Permanent Committee on the 27th of February 1948, and its functions, facilities, and mandate transferred wholesale to the FAO, which kept the Rome headquarters.

• 3. The First Director and His Prize

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  Sir John Boyd Orr chaired the FAO's inaugural session at the Château Frontenac and served as its first Director-General from October 1945 through April 1948. His work on ending world hunger and his role in creating the FAO earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949. That recognition pointed toward what the young organization hoped to become: a scientific and humanitarian force capable of reshaping global food systems. In 1951, the headquarters moved from Washington, D.C., to Rome - a symbolic anchoring in the city where the IIA had first taken root. By the 1960s, the FAO had pivoted toward developing high-yield grain strains, attacking protein deficiency, and promoting rural employment. The organization recognized in 1961 that natural resource depletion was an urgent problem, and by 1967 had joined the International Biological Program in response. That same decade, the FAO partnered with the United Nations General Assembly to establish the UN World Food Programme, now the world's largest humanitarian organization focused on hunger and food security.

• 4. Summits, Declarations, Crises

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  In 1974, a famine spreading across Africa pushed the FAO to convene the first World Food Summit. The meeting produced a proclamation that every man, woman, and child holds "the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition" - and a pledge to eradicate these conditions within a decade. That decade came and went without the goal achieved. A second World Food Summit in 1996, attended by 112 heads or deputy heads of state and government, acknowledged the shortfall and established a new strategic plan aimed at halving hunger by 2015. Alongside the official proceedings, 1,200 civil society organizations from 80 countries gathered in a parallel NGO forum, criticizing the growing industrialization of agriculture and demanding more protection for the right to food. In December 2007, as food prices soared globally, the FAO launched its Initiative on Soaring Food Prices, contributing to the UN High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis. Projects were carried out in over 25 countries, with inter-agency missions in nearly 60. Among specific interventions, the FAO funded the distribution and multiplication of quality seeds in Haiti, which the organization credited with significantly increasing food production. In May 2009, the FAO and the European Union signed an aid package worth 125 million euros to support small farmers in countries hit hardest by rising food prices - part of the EU's one-billion-euro Food Facility established in partnership with the UN Secretary-General's task force.

• 5. Programs Beyond the Headlines

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  TeleFood, launched in 1997, took an unusual approach to the hunger problem: concerts, sporting events, and celebrity partnerships designed to generate donations through media attention. Since its launch, the campaign raised close to 28 million US dollars, funding small-scale projects that ranged from fishing equipment for coastal communities to school gardens in Cape Verde and Mauritania, pig-raising assistance in Venezuela, and fish cultivation in a leprosy community in India. In 1999 the FAO Goodwill Ambassadors Programme began, drawing figures from music, cinema, literature, sport, and government into public awareness work. Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, actress Susan Sarandon, singer Céline Dion, and Olympic track-and-field legend Carl Lewis were among those who became involved. On the scientific side, the FAO and the World Health Organization jointly created the Codex Alimentarius Commission in 1961 to develop international food standards and safety guidelines. The FAO established the International Plant Protection Convention in 1952, an international treaty now ratified by 183 contracting parties as of July 2018, dedicated to preventing the cross-border spread of pests and plant diseases. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture - also known as the Plant Treaty or Seed Treaty - entered into force on the 29th of June 2004 with the FAO as its depositary.

• 6. Structure and Finances

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  The FAO is governed by a biennial conference in which each of its 195 members - 194 countries plus the European Union - sends a representative. That conference elects a 49-member executive council, whose members serve three-year rotating terms as an interim governing body. The director-general heads daily operations; as of August 2019 that post has been held by Qu Dongyu of China. The FAO's total planned budget for 2018-2019 was 1,005.6 million US dollars for its Regular Programme. Voluntary contributions from members and partner organizations were projected to reach approximately 1.6 billion US dollars in 2016-2017. Beginning in 1994, the organization undertook its most significant restructuring since its founding, aiming to decentralize operations, streamline procedures, and reduce costs. The result was annual savings of approximately 50 million US dollars, or 43 million euros. The FAO's world headquarters sits in Rome in what was formerly the seat of the Department of Italian East Africa. One notable physical feature stood outside the building for decades: the Axum Obelisk, taken from Ethiopia by Benito Mussolini's troops in 1937 as war booty and returned on the 18th of April 2005.

• 7. Decades of Criticism

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  The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, attacked the FAO in early 1989, describing it as essentially irrelevant due to what it called a bloated bureaucracy marked by mediocrity and inefficiency. The U.S. State Department expressed in 1990 that the FAO had lagged behind other UN organizations in responding to calls for better program and budget processes. The Ecologist magazine in 1991 devoted a special issue to the organization under the heading "The UN Food and Agriculture Organization: Promoting World Hunger", with contributors including Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, and Edward Goldsmith. A 2004 FAO report on agricultural biotechnology sparked an open letter signed by more than 650 organizations, which accused the agency of breaking commitments to civil society and aligning with the biotechnology industry. Director-General Jacques Diouf acknowledged in response that biotechnology research was driven primarily by a small number of transnational corporations pursuing patents rather than solutions relevant to food security in developing countries. In October 2007, an independent external evaluation spanning more than 400 pages - the first of its kind in the organization's history - concluded that the FAO was in a financial and programme crisis, describing a heavy bureaucracy, declining capacity, and core competencies under threat. Hundreds of FAO staff subsequently signed a petition demanding a radical shift in management culture. In November 2008, FAO member countries agreed to a 42.6 million US dollar, three-year Immediate Plan of Action for reform, with 21.8 million earmarked specifically for overhauling financial procedures and human resources management.

• 8. Current Direction

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  Qu Dongyu took office as Director-General in August 2019, becoming the first Chinese national to hold the post. An investigation by German public broadcaster ARD reported that under his leadership the FAO had been oriented toward Chinese interests, pointing to deliveries of pesticides banned in Europe from the Chinese agrochemical company Syngenta, UN projects aligned with China's Belt and Road Initiative, and other investment arrangements. In July 2020, the FAO Council approved a series of modernization measures proposed by Qu Dongyu, including adoption of a more flexible organizational structure designed to improve cross-sectoral collaboration and responsiveness to emerging priorities. The FAO's FAOSTAT database, maintained by its Global Statistics Service, offers free access to data from 245 countries and 35 regional areas dating back to 1961 - one of the most comprehensive agricultural datasets in existence. The Unasylva journal, the FAO's peer-reviewed forestry publication, has appeared in English, French, and Spanish since 1947, making it the longest-running multilingual forestry journal in the world - a quiet measure of institutional continuity stretching back nearly to the organization's founding day.