Something Like a Global Government of Land

This chapter recounts the gathering of officers of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome to contemplate their role on a global scale. Their challenge was to help peasants in developing nations farm economically and thereby maintain control over their own land. It considers the movement of FAO from Quebec to Rome as a symbol of its founders' desires to serve the decolonizing nations of the world. The chapter discusses how advocates of redistribution at the FAO labored through the 1950s to create an international organization largely concerned with land and invested with an unprecedented power to advise governments around the world and with the authority to construct grand plans. The FAO was given the Latin motto Fiat Panis or “Let There Be Bread,” being charged with the explicit mission of defending and feeding peasants around the world.