advantages of a world food policy. The final report on The Relation of Health,
Agriculture and Economic Policy, published by the League in 1937, indicated the
lines along which the expansion of the world economy could most easily begin. It
was declared a best-seller by The New York Times (Boyd Orr, 1966, p. 120). Walter
Elliot and Earl De La Warr, respectively Minister and Under-Secretary for Agricul-
ture in the United Kingdom, saw that the food problem of a `glut' followed by a
fall in food prices paid to farmers was one of under-consumption rather than over-
production. In 1938, 22 nations, including the United States and Russia, met in
conference to arrange how this new world food policy could be carried out. But the
outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 brought this promising development
to an end. The view was expressed that if the League of Nations had devoted more
time to social and economic problems than to politics, it might have succeeded
in eliminating the causes of war.
security. They discussed the League's work with both President Roosevelt and
Vice-President Henry Wallace, and suggested that as food was, in Roosevelt's
language, `the first want of man', a world food policy would be the best way to
begin to fulfil the promise of freedom from want for all people that was previously
made in the Atlantic Charter, signed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister
Churchill in August 1941 (Freidel, 1990, pp. 3878).
Phillips, 1981). Born in the United Kingdom, he became a fruit grower in Australia
and then economic adviser to Lord Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner in
London. MacDougall had shown a keen interest in the work of Boyd Orr on human
nutrition and had frequently visited his research institute in Scotland, and had
kept Lord Bruce informed. He was enormously impressed by the new knowledge
of nutrition that developed between the two world wars. He was equally impressed
by the paradox of the emergence of food surpluses during the depression of the
1930s alongside hunger and malnutrition not only in the developing countries
but also among the unemployed, children and old people in the most economic-
ally advanced countries. His conviction that these two `evils' should cancel each
other out was crystallized in his phrase `the marriage of food and agriculture'. He
succeeded in inducing the League of Nations to set up an international committee
on nutrition. He wrote a memorandum on The Agricultural and Health Problem in
1935, which served as a first step towards bringing before the League the findings
of nutritionists indicating that a large proprtion of the world's population did not
get enough of the right sort of food, and the view that food production should be
expanded to meet nutritional requirements, rather than restricted (Phillips, 1981).
But his greatest success was when he sold the idea of an international agency to
combat hunger to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which led to the Hot Springs
conference.