Freedom from Hunger Campaign

Abstract

The 1960s began with an entirely new approach in the quest for world food security on the initiative of a new FAO director-general, the first, and so far the only one, from the Asia region. Binay Ranjan Sen, popularly known as B. R. Sen, had been India’s Director-General of Food during wartime (1943–46), his primary task being to ensure equitable distribution of scarce food supplies for one-sixth of the world’s population. He wrote: ‘All my life I had been in the midst of hunger and poverty in all its stark reality’ (Sen, 1982, p. 137). He had followed closely the discussions at the Hot Springs, Quebec and Copenhagen conferences and had seen that while they had opened a new chapter in international solidarity, they had also shown that the major powers were not prepared to establish some form of world food security arrangement under the control of a multilateral organization. A different strategy was therefore required that would be more acceptable to them but would also keep the goal of eliminating hunger alive.