The post-1929 world depression had a devastating effect on agriculture and left the farming community on its knees. The financial crisis saw food-importing countries hastily raising tariff barriers and increasing their national food production. With a 60 percent drop in wheat imports, trade collapsed and food surpluses abounded. As new findings on poverty and nutrition were revealed in the 1930s, nutritionists were calling for increasing consumption while economists pushed for decreasing production.

This paradox was analyzed by the Australian nutritionist, Frank Mc Dougall, who advocated to ‘marry health and agriculture’ and to bring together various disciplines to address the issue of malnutrition. His proposals were widely accepted by governments and the public alike and the time seemed ripe then for collective action but unfortunately, the Second World War halted any further progress.

In 1942 McDougall’s proposals eventually found their way into the hands of the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who arranged for him to meet the then US President. During a dinner at the White House, McDougall passionately called for a United Nations programme to tackle food as its first global economic problem, envisioning agriculture as critical in raising the life standards of people throughout the world.

President Roosevelt showed no reaction, but the discussion of that dinner must have struck a deep chord as a year later, he convened the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, in Hot Springs, Virginia, where forty-four governments committed themselves to founding a permanent organization for food and agriculture.

The creation of FAO could not have come at a better time: with Europe in ruins, hunger had become a real threat to many. At that meeting, the first Director-General was also elected, Lord John Boyd Orr, a Scot, who was widely admired for his extensive work on nutrition. 

A year after its creation, FAO still needed to prove to governments that poverty lay at the root cause of hunger and malnutrition.

In early 1946 it was clear that a combination of dislocation and drought would seriously endanger people’s access to food in the following years. FAO estimated that there would be a massive gap between people’s needs and food supplies in the 1946/47 crop year and urgently recommended a number of measures.

This is why FAO convened a Special meeting on Urgent Food Problems in Washington on May 1946. The meeting not only tackled the immediate food crisis but also prepared a set of proposals for dealing with old-age issues related to food production. Undertaking world censuses regularly, dealing with plants pest control and responding to emergencies with food relief were some of the key issues addressed by. At that meeting, improving soil fertility was seen as one of the most pressing issues to be addressed.