Hope and failure in a day of miracles

Unrealised global governance innovations from 1942 to 1950

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech includes ‘Freedom from Want’ (1941)

He runs with this. And at

1943 Hot Springs

Conference on Food and

Agriculture, allied nations

agreed to found the UN Food

and Agriculture

Organisation: the FAO.

flickr.com/photos/keithwj/

In October 1945, shortly

after the UN is

established, the FAO is

created at Quebec.

Here’s a commemorative

plaque

This is Sir John Boyd Orr. Renowned nutrition scientist. Founder of the Rowett Institute. Great Scot.

Not an official representative at the Quebec conference as he’d upset the British Govt with reports of child malnutrition in WW2.

Due to his prominence as a scientist, he’s invited to speak at the conference anyway.

He gives a kick-ass speech, helping the delegates recognise the importance of their work.

As a result, the FAO elects him their first Director-General.

‘I want no millionaire to have an orange, until all children everywhere have had food’

Boyd Orr

'if the nations cannot agree on a food program affecting the welfare of people everywhere, there is little hope of their reaching agreement on anything’

Much of Europe is seriously

malnourished.

Parts of Germany and Italy

face starvation.

Meanwhile

In 1943, the world had witnessed the Bengal Famine, in which somewhere between two and four million people died.

And in 1945, the FAO’s first World Food Survey finds:

One billion people are not getting an adequate daily calorie intake

(At this time there are only 2.4bn people on the planet.)

So, in 1946 at Christiansborg, Denmark, Boyd Orr proposes a World Food Board.

Flickr: Esmtll

The World Food Board

An executive agency of UN FAO with three tasks:

1. Manage buffer stocks to stabilise prices2. Provide capital for the developing world, supplied

at low rates. Agricultural development = better fed people = better productivity = growth = long term ability to pay back the capital loans.

3. Provide emergency aid: at a certain point, money doesn’t matter – if people are starving, feed them. With multilateral food aid from any buffer stocks surplus

Great stuff. Caring

and sharing on a

multilateral basis.

But the US doesn’t fancy paying for something it can’t control.

The UK doesn’t want to lose cheap imports from its colonies.

So it never happens.

There is no World

Food Board.

Meanwhile, at Bretton Woods..

John Maynard Keynes - all round genius with a dodgy ticker – proposes an International Clearing Union

Abandons gold

standard link,

invents new

international

currency: the Bancor

International Clearing Union

1. Each member state starts with a set amount of Bancor credits.

2. If they spent more on imports than they gained through exports, they could draw on Bancor credits as an overdraft.

3. On the flipside, if they earned more than they spent, their credits would grow.

4. An imbalance, credit or debt, would be discouraged through interest payments and ultimately currency revaluations.

GENIUS.

All they were really doing, Keynes argued, was applying domestic commercial banking principles to the closed inter-state economy.

The idea was that it would allow the seriously damaged economies of Europe (especially Britain) to spend their way back to full employment, while not creating a huge savings glut on the other side of the Atlantic, cos the US would be incentivised to keep spending.

Keynes the

brainsWhite the (economic) might

But the clearing union doesn’t benefit the US. Instead, White proposes Int’l Monetary Fund under US control. #Wins

The IMF is est. in

Washington, five mins

from State, Treasury and

White House.

Hardly the brilliant

multilateral system it

could have been.

Photo: endthelie.com

Meanwhile, in London, (and then shortly afterwards in Geneva and then Havana)...

1946: US decides it needs International Trade Organisation, cos free trade = no war. Maybe.

World agrees.

London and Geneva attempts to arrange = bickering about free trade vs full employment vs development

But somehow, here at

Havana in 1947, a

remarkable deal is

reached. Demands for

free trade balanced with

those of full

employment and of

development.

www.unmultimedia.org

And US negotiator Will

Clayton signs the treaty,

despite the US not

having all controlling

influence over the

institution! A truly

counterhegemonic deal

is on the cards...

www.unmultimedia.org

But! At Geneva,

negotiations were split

in two: those on tariff

reductions, and then the

rest of the rules on

negotiations, settlement

of disputes, and all the

limits.

The tariff reductions are

quickly passed back in

the US, but the full

Charter has to go to the

Senate..

And, because it’s not really in the particular interests of the US, the rest of the Charter is never ratified.

As a result, the bit that passed, the ‘General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade’, with its small secretariat, becomes the de facto global trade body until the WTO is founded by the US and EU in 1995, with little say from the rest of the world.

So the International Trade Organisation never exists.

Post-war opportunity missed. Again.

What might have been?

What can we learn from failure?

It’s about America.

The US had the final say

on everything. The UN

happened because the

US wanted it to. The rest

of the world needed US

resources so they got

their way on these three

unrealised institutions.

Today the picture is

different: multipolarity

makes negotiations

longer and harder, but

the results won’t only

reflect US interests.

It’s about people.

Brilliant individuals like Keynes could only fight their corner so hard before they lost their backers at home.

The passion of those like Boyd Orr might have aggravated others, and they may have overlooked other opportunities to see their goals met.

And it’s about time.

The post-war half-decade saw moments of true worldly possibilities, in which the horrors of war opened space for innovation in world affairs. A time when all sorts of global cooperative possibilities existed.

Yet memory is fickle. This moment was not to last long. As the cold war began to set the agenda, this creative moment was lost by 1950.

But ideas don’t die.

Some have argued that

the ideas behind these

three institutions never

went away, even if

they were never

realised in physical

form.

Chinese Finance Minister Zhou Xiaochuan recently suggested that the world could reconsider Keynes’ bancor.

And Boyd Orr’s world- without-hunger continues to inspire.

Four agencies of the UN and an army of charities and thinktanks strive to meet this goal.

So watch this space.

Let’s hope we don’t

require a massive global

crisis to start realising

some of these post-45

goals.

Lessons from history: coalitions for change must be global, hegemonic control of negotiations must be fought, and brilliant individuals who pursue a better world must be supported to dream, inspire and create.

FIN

@j0e_m