The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations celebrates World Food Day each year on 16 October, the day on which the Organization was founded in 1945. The World Food Day and TeleFood theme for 2005, "Agriculture and intercultural dialogue", recalls the contribution of different cultures to world agriculture and argues that sincere intercultural dialogue is a precondition for progress against hunger and environmental degradation.

Although the substitution of farming and livestock raising for hunting and gathering as the main mode of food production - the birth of agriculture - occurred independently in many parts of the world around 10 000 years ago, the history of agriculture is full of examples of important intercultural exchanges. The first archeological record of farming in Europe shows advanced tool technology but provides no evidence of simpler tools. One theory is that peoples from the Middle East brought their tools and technologies to Europe. Similar movements of farming peoples are thought to have occurred in Africa, Central and South America, China, India and Southeast Asia. Why did they move? Agriculture provided a more dependable source of food, causing populations to increase; eventually excess population migrated to new lands.