The Cold War And American Food Diplomacy

The world food crisis and the detente of the Cold War in the early1970s hadprovided an opportunity for the United States to rebuild the global food system.As the world’s major grain producing and exporting country, the U.S. activelypushed the international community to take collective action and turned crisis intoopportunities. Thus the world food conference had become an important platformfor the U.S. to practice its idea.In the process, the U.S., the Soviet Union and their allies, developingcountries and oil-exporting countries “calmly” came together to deal with theglobal food issues directly in the World Food Conference. It’s noteworthy thatduring the time of proposal, preparation, organization and coordination we couldsee the U.S. everywhere and it helped a lot during the World Food Conference.The U.S. not only kept in touch with the United Nations, FAO, UN ECOSOC andnon-governmental organizations, but also tried to convince more countries andinternational organizations to participate in the meeting. The U.S. tried to use thefood issues to cross the Cold War “iron curtain” and built global food “neworder” which the Eastern and Western world could join in together. Thus theWorld Food Conference1974and the constitution of the new global food systemwere also attached to “American” label.In this article, I try to unscramble the latest U.S. Foreign Relations Files, theState Department Files from the U.S. National Archives, the FAO files, the UNWorld Food Conference1974records and other historical files such asnewspapers, papers etc. I try to in-depth comprehensive explain the role playedby the U.S. in the1974World Food Conference and the game between all theparties using different methods of history, politics, international relations,economics and other subjects.This paper attempts to start with the perspectives of nation-state and international mechanism relations, trying to make clear the role played by the U.S.in the1974World Food Conference, understanding the conflict and cooperationof the international community in this process, and then try to take this case toshow the complexity and variability of international Cold War history studies. Atthe same time, it tries to pay attention to non-traditional security issues such asfood problem, to show the different faces of Cold War International HistoryStudies.