Between Entanglements and Dependencies: Food, Nutrition, and National Development at the Central American Institute of Nutrition (INCAP)

Abstract

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed “Freedom from Want” as one of the goals of the postwar world order in his famous address to Congress of January 1941, freedom from hunger was an essential part of it. Indeed, two years later Roosevelt convened the conference at Hot Springs, Virginia, that would result in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO. The victory over famine and malnutrition was one of the great promises of the postwar world order and was viewed as an indispensable element of economic progress and development. Yet even the scholars who, in recent years, have begun to tackle the much-neglected history of development, have almost completely ignored the field of food policy. The few existing studies focus on the major international organizations and adopt a headquarters-centred perspective. 1 Contributions to the field have also been made by scholars of US foreign policy and by historians of important private foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, so that we find solid studies of certain features such as food aid or the “green revolution”. 2 Another strand of the historiography of development is modelled on Arturo Escobar’s and Gustavo Esteva’s incisive critiques of development as a Western-initiated discourse that creates tight constraints on agency in the developing world and perpetuates dependencies. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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