Online published on 23 January, 2019.
Even though international cooperation in food and agriculture is considered to have begun in its true sense in the first half of the twentieth century, a better understanding of current international cooperation is possible only by looking far beyond the present into its historical evolution. Such an undertaking requires tracing the origins of agriculture, exploring early food flows and examining how food transformed from something grown to be eaten to something grown to be sold, prior to the establishment of cooperative arrangements at the international level, beginning with the League of Nations. This article traces and chronicles the history of food and agriculture in the ancient and modern worlds until the creation of the fi rst intergovernmental organisation—the International Institute of Agriculture—that has remained a prototype of international cooperation.
