Abstract

After the global upheaval of World War II, the desire for more staple foods was a shared theme in two competing visions for the future—one involving the reconsolidation of imperial control, the other gradual independence from empire. ¹ American, Russian and European development organizations, fearing the loss of imperial order within the global system, promoted massive expansions of their international agriculture and food aid programs. Anti-colonial nationalists in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America organized a global effort to free the production of wheat, rice and other staple foods from what they saw as exploitative imperial agendas and practices. Emerging nations, they argued, would have to wrest control over food research from imperial governments in order to reconfigure the production and improvement of staple foods. Their calls to reorder the global food system and develop agricultural technologies to support anti-imperial ambitions mobilized researchers, farmers and politicians around the globe. In a world destabilized by war and empire, both the leaders of imperial powers and those of emerging nations scrambled to reform agricultural production and increase annual yields. Exactly how these reforms would translate into improvements in the diet of billions, however, was unclear.