International Organizations and Food: Nearing the End of the Lean Season?

Abstract

This chapter maps the field of international organizations (IOs) in food that has been institutionalized as a global policy field since WWII and has undergone several shifts since then. The chapter traces the emergence of the major IOs of the field, especially the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Food Program, and more recently also the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund. The second half of the twentieth century began with visionary ideas about the global regulation of food production and consumption, moved to a concern with smallholders and food security, and ended with a neoliberal shift away from production toward ensuring consumption through world trade. The new millennium is marked by a rhetorical consensus between the main IOs, new debates about production, hopes in the social protection agenda, as well as increasingly vocal organized critics of the dominant order.