The ILO and agricultural labour. Early successes, long-term challenges

When the policy-making organ of the ILO, the International Labour Conference, met for the first time in Washington in 1919, its remit was to discuss and adopt international labour conventions, which would constitute a body of international labour legislation for industrial workers.Footnote ¹² Although its ideal of universal membership was weakened from the outset by the absence of a number of states, including the United States and Soviet Russia, the ILO's unique tripartite structure meant that this was the first time that governments, employers and workers were all involved in the decision-making process.Footnote ¹³ After resolving questions of membership, setting up the largely European governing body and electing the dynamic French Socialist and social reformer Albert Thomas as its director, the Conference set to work on two topics: the problem of working hours, and long-term unemployment in industry.Footnote ¹⁴ These first controversial discussions resulted in a number of conventions drafted to limit the social effects of unemployment and secure the protection of women and young persons.Footnote ¹⁵ Backed by the majority of its delegates, the Conference also rather surprisingly voted in favour of a motion from the Spanish labour delegate, strongly supported by Thomas, in favour of considering in the near future (at the Conference's third session in 1921) the application of these resolutions to agricultural labour.Footnote ¹⁶

The ILO's early awareness of the importance of agriculture must be viewed against the political and economic background of the time. As Jasmin Van Daele has argued, the inspiration behind the ILO was a desire to ‘eliminate social breakdown through collective improvements’.Footnote ¹⁷ Although the political and economic agenda of addressing the ‘needs’ of rural workers was never made explicit, it stemmed from the rapid political, economic and social changes in the agricultural sector during the First World War. The war had brought important shifts in industrial and agricultural production and labour organisation. It had caused large-scale destruction of industries and disruption of transport and communication networks. In Europe, where most people still lived in rural environments, agricultural output fell rapidly and food production stagnated, resulting in food shortages and even threats of famine.Footnote ¹⁸ As described by Iris Borowy, perceptions of rural life in Europe began changing after the First World War from the romantic idealisation of the ‘wholesome countryside’ with its ‘uncorrupted people’ to a growing concern about dirt, backwardness and ignorance.Footnote ¹⁹ At a time of widespread unrest and political instability, poverty and disease in rural areas were increasingly perceived as a security issue. As the Russian Revolution had shown, peasants could form a massive force for upheaval. Peasant parties were formed in Croatia, Poland and Bulgaria. Land reform became a prominent issue in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy and Spain, and resulted in a dramatic wave of collectivisation in the Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁰ It was against this incendiary socio-economic and political backdrop that the ILO called for the reform of labour conditions in agriculture.

Agriculture had featured as an international problem since the late nineteenth century. A series of agricultural crises between the 1870s and the late 1890s, known as the ‘Long Depression’, along with improvements in shipping and rail networks and the need to adjust methods of cultivation and products to increasing global competition,Footnote ²¹ had given rise to a series of international congresses and regular meetings of co-operative organisations such as the International Commission of Agriculture and the International Co-operative Alliance. The agricultural sector was torn between the need to address problems of international competition arising from globalisation, and traditionally protectionist governmental interests.Footnote ²² A step towards permanent international co-operation in the agricultural sector had been taken with the establishment of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) in Rome in 1905 and its statistical and crop-reporting activities.Footnote ²³ These activities, however, were largely technical and scientific and did not include any discussion of reforming labour conditions. The ILO was thus embarking on a pioneering effort.Footnote ²⁴

In order to prepare the ILO's first conference on agricultural issues in 1921, the Agricultural Service set out to assemble statistical information by sending questionnaires to its member states on hours of work, unemployment, protection of women and children, technical agricultural education, living-in conditions, rights of association and social insurance. Replies to this ambitious enquiry highlighted regional, national and seasonal variations and the importance of custom over legislation.Footnote ²⁵ Battling with a lack of synthesis and an absence of national legislation, the 1921 Conference concluded that labour conditions in agriculture differed fundamentally from other fields of labour regulation and then proceeded, somewhat contradictorily, to adapt the existing industrial labour code to agriculture. The resolutions subsequently passed by the Conference applied to waged agricultural workers only, and they were inconsistent and weaker than those applied to industrial workers at the Washington meeting.Footnote ²⁶ The result was that three conventions, all subject to separate ratifications, called for the extension to agricultural workers of measures relating to minimum age, right of association and compensation for accidents a work.Footnote ²⁷ They did so in less rigid terms than the industrial conventions. With regard to minimum age, for instance, they ruled that children under fourteen should be allowed to work provided this would not reduce their total annual school attendance to less than eight months.Footnote ²⁸ Further crucial issues, such as the prevention of unemployment, maternity protection, women's work, night work, children's work, vocational education, accommodation and social insurance, were addressed by less stringent recommendations. A proposal to limit working hours in agriculture was deleted from the conference's agenda after generating stormy debates and encountering strong opposition from the influential Swiss Professor of Agronomy and President of the Swiss Peasants’ Union, Ernest Laur, who found it ‘entirely inapplicable’.Footnote ²⁹ A prolific and sometimes controversial writer, Laur embodied the contradictions of agrarian internationalism in the 1920s. His conservative defence of national protectionism and of the preservation of small farmers as part of the Swiss national ideology clashed with his endorsement of agricultural modernisation and his participation in international agricultural organisations such as the Commission Internationale d'Agriculture.Footnote ³⁰ More fundamental objections to the inclusion of agricultural labour questions came from the French government. Suspecting that the ILO would try to interfere with the regulation of agricultural production, it raised the question whether the ILO was competent to deal with agricultural matters.Footnote ³¹ The question was brought before the Permanent Court of International Justice, where it was settled in favour of the ILO in 1922.Footnote ³² Although, to Thomas's great satisfaction, this determined once and for all the organisation's competence to legislate on agricultural labour, only two inter-war sessions of the International Labour Conference passed any such legislation after 1921.Footnote ³³ Thus, despite the early ground-breaking internationalisation of agricultural labour issues and the potential social implications of some of the standards set, their influence on the practical development of social legislation in individual countries remained minute. Compared to the conventions on industrial labour, the number of ratifications was considerably lower and their future normative effect for national legislation and practice uncertain. Given the lack of feedback on their application received by the ILO in later years, Louise Howard thought that the problem of agricultural labour had been placed on the agenda of the International Labour Conference too early.Footnote ³⁴ An ‘unforeseen result’ of the ILO's early efforts, Howard claimed, was that ‘important ground was covered in rather a hasty way, before the ILO had much experience of its duties’.Footnote ³⁵

A kaleidoscopic field, the challenges of tripartism and a lack of representation

Rather than being a matter of (bad) timing as suggested by Howard's rather bleak assessment, the problems faced by the ILO when discussing agricultural labour lay in the very nature of the issue and in the ILO's particular organisational set-up; and both continued to hamper its efforts throughout the 1920s. As the ILO was soon to find out, the difficulties of addressing agricultural labour according to the fundamental principles of universality and tripartism, which guided its functioning from the outset, were manifold. Apart from the conspicuous absence of leading industrial and agricultural powers such as the United States, Germany and Soviet Russia, the problem was the heterogeneity of the subject. Despite the modernisation of food production, agriculture's dependence on processes of natural growth and on variable seasonal and climatic factors (among other circumstances) made for fluctuating production and immensely varied labour organisation across the world.Footnote ³⁶ The agricultural population in the 1920s included vegetable growers, pastoralists and dairy farmers. Any treatment of the subject had to take account of the social and economic differences between subsistence agriculture and the specialised production of cash crops. Ranging from independent peasants to large-scale landowners, and encompassing additional labour from waged farm workers such as permanent farmhands and day labourers, but also tenants, domestic servants and unwaged family members and in some cases forced labour, the resulting variety of labour relations in European agriculture, let alone in different regions of the world, constituted, as Howard put it, a ‘social kaleidoscope of agricultural labour’ with a wide variety of cultural, social and economic implications.Footnote ³⁷ Not only was it difficult to define common problems affecting agricultural waged labour, but the dynamism of the sector made it necessary to take account of rapid changes in agricultural population caused by migration and mechanisation. Yet, while the ILO saw agricultural labour as constituting a special category of workers who deserved (and could be provided with) working conditions analogous to those of their industrial counterparts, it was slow to address the lack of analytical categories and the fact that the term ‘agricultural workers’ encompassed both employers and employees, landowners and domestic servants.Footnote ³⁸ Rather, it decided to confine itself to reforming conditions for the minority of ‘waged agricultural labourers’ employed in a predominantly European context.

Despite its initially limited focus, however, the ILO's greatest challenge when addressing agricultural issues remained its own institutional set-up. In order to formulate international social policies, the ILO relied on a unique tripartite machinery, which required governments to nominate employers’ and workers’ delegates from the most representative organisations.Footnote ³⁹ In the field of agriculture, one of the main difficulties faced by the ILO was the problematic distinction between those who employed and those who provided labour in agriculture, plus the very limited scope of international agricultural unions in general. Created after the First World War, organisations such as the International Landworkers’ Federation and the International Federation of Christian Landworkers were young associations which did not constitute a representative international movement. Longer-established international associations such as the Commission Internationale d'Agriculture and the International Co-operative Alliance were not trade unions, and the social aspects of agricultural production and trade were peripheral to their remit. Despite officially recognising the ‘right of association’ of agricultural workers in 1921, the ILO continued to battle with the lack of international organisation and representation throughout the 1920s.Footnote ⁴⁰ This, together with the ILO's aim of intensifying relations with the newly emerged Eastern European nation states, prompted its director Albert Thomas to call in 1925 for the creation of a ‘Green International’ that would encompass the agricultural trade unions now slowly emerging in Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁴¹ As Thomas outlined in his letters to organisations in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, the creation of such an international authority would be of paramount importance to the International Labour Office's future work:

Thomas's appeal generated little response, as general scepticism towards the ILO's technical competence and towards the internationalisation of the agricultural domain prevailed in agricultural circles throughout most of the 1920s. In an attempt to understand this comparative lack of organisation, the ILO conducted an international study, the results of which were published in 1928. It put the problem down to the dispersion of agricultural workers and the absence of any clear and accepted distinction between employers and employees in agriculture.Footnote ⁴³

Furthermore, agriculture's lowly position at the ILO was made worse by a lack of systematic co-operation with other national and international agricultural interest groups which could have shared their knowledge and experience. The ILO's work depended on close relations with advisers from intergovernmental organisations and international associations, which it invited to be represented on its technical committees. Yet, in the case of the Commission Internationale d'Agriculture, for instance, relations were fraught with difficulty. Active since the late 1880s and with offices in the Swiss town of Brugg and in Paris, the Commission Internationale d'Agriculture had organised a number of international congresses on agriculture in various European cities before the First World War.Footnote ⁴⁴ Described as a ‘kind of free-lance in the world's agricultural community’,Footnote ⁴⁵ the commission had requested official attachment to the League of Nations, thus sparking a debate about the interpretation of Article 24 of the League's covenant on the affiliation of international bodies.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1923, the ILO advised the League not to grant the Commission affiliation on the grounds that the latter had initially opposed the ILO's involvement in questions of agricultural labour and that relations between the two were therefore ‘not harmonious’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although members of the Commission Internationale d'Agriculture, such as Laur and its influential French Vice-President, Marquis François de Vogüé, progressively acquired influence as advisers in technical committees on agricultural work, co-operation was never made official. Moreover the ILO largely omitted to connect with agricultural service unions or with the network of individuals and voluntary and charitable organisations with an interest in rural life, such as countrywomen's associations. The ILO's pickiness in acknowledging other organisations in the field and the generally suspicious attitude of specialised associations towards the ILO's work on agriculture meant that it missed out on opportunities to influence sectors of opinion outside its own closed circles.

Finally, these structural and organisational difficulties also impacted on an essential function of the International Labour Office: the collection and distribution of information and the co-ordination of research. As the Agricultural Service soon discovered, reliable information on working conditions in agriculture was scarce and difficult to come by. Many countries lacked agricultural legislation in the 1920s, which made comparative surveys impossible. Even when material was available, as in the case of newly emerged Eastern European nation states, the ILO's notoriously understaffed Agricultural Service struggled to access it because of language difficulties.Footnote ⁴⁸ The sources on which the Agricultural Service had to rely were ‘unsystematic and spasmodic as well as somewhat infrequent’, and funding for new studies and publications remained scarce.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although articles on agricultural labour were regularly published in the ILO's flagship journal, the International Labour Review, plans to address the subject in a set of specialised ‘agricultural notes’ were postponed indefinitely.Footnote ⁵⁰ Despite Howard's relentless efforts to reform and enlarge the Agricultural Service, the latter remained in a ‘disorganised state’ for most of the 1920s. In contrast to other departments of the ILO, the Agricultural Service rarely received requests from member states and organisations for information and assistance in formulating legislative policies.Footnote ⁵¹

Co-operation and competition: The Mixed Advisory Agricultural Committee

Given the inherent financial limitations and structural problems experienced by the ILO in agricultural matters from the very beginning, much of the organisation's success in the agricultural field inevitably depended on the constitution of technical commissions, an important step towards focusing attention on particular problems and gathering technical expertise. One of the resolutions taken by the International Labour Conference in 1921 called for the establishment of ‘a methodical system of enquiry with a view to the efficient organisation and development of the means of agricultural production’.Footnote ⁵² In claiming this as a future field of activity, the ILO was trespassing into the domain of the IIA in Rome, and it soon became clear that ‘some understanding between these two official international organisations was essential if duplication of effort and misunderstandings were to be avoided’.Footnote ⁵³ Since its inauguration in 1905, the IIA had held a monopoly on agricultural questions within international circles, particularly concerning statistical data, economic aspects of production and the diffusion of new agricultural technologies. Member states, mostly represented by diplomatic delegations, had varied views on what the IIA's main focus should be. The USA and Britain favoured the collection of statistics, Latin American countries wanted to promote the diffusion of new agricultural technologies, while Belgium, for instance, showed an interest in problems of rural society and the conditions of agricultural workers.Footnote ⁵⁴ Dominated by a desire to increase agricultural profits, the IIA had resumed its activities after the First World War. Its early bids for recognition from the newly created League of Nations failed,Footnote ⁵⁵ but its relation with the ILO was institutionalised in a technical working group, the Mixed Advisory Agricultural Committee, set up in 1922 and comprising delegates from the ILO and members from the IIA in equal proportions. The ILO tried to apply its tripartite principle by electing as its representatives the French chairman of the governing body, Arthur Fontaine, the Danish employers’ delegate H. C. Oersted, and Theodor Leipart, the representative of the German Federation of Trade Unions. The IIA was represented by the Italian delegate for Cirenaica and Tripolitania, Edoardo Soderini; the delegate of the British Ministry of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Elliott; and the Norwegian politician Anders Fjelstad, who acted as the Committee's rapporteur. They were joined by invited experts, mostly representatives of international agricultural organisations, including François de Vogüé of the Commission Internationale d'Agriculture and Bene Carels, secretary of the newly created International Christian Landworkers’ Federation.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet, although the ILO's director Albert Thomas optimistically stated that ‘the fields assigned to the International Institute of Agriculture and the International Labour Organization are largely complementary and cover the whole range of international agriculture’, the differences between the two organisations determined in many ways the subsequent lack of progress on agricultural labour questions.Footnote ⁵⁷ As with other issues, such as the problem of occupational disease, where the ILO had to face up to sharing the work with other international bodies, a dialectic of co-operation and competition ensued.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although the ILO had hoped that the Mixed Committee would work like other technical committees concerned with a particular occupation (such as the influential Joint Maritime Commission, which consisted of ship-owners and seafarers’ representatives), it spent most of the early 1920s endeavouring to define the respective functions of the two organisations and the lines of their future collaboration.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Mixed Committee's annual meetings, alternately in Geneva and Rome, did not create the desired platform for the articulation of social agricultural problems. The greatest problem was appointing suitable independent experts and deciding what their influence should be.Footnote ⁶⁰ Experts, ‘known for their organisational leadership rather than for their specialised technical abilities’, were appointed before the agenda of the Committee was set, and their attendance at the annual meetings was sporadic.Footnote ⁶¹ Moreover, although the IIA's American member, Asher Hobson, had successfully argued for the participation of additional non-European delegates, which led to the inclusion of the Argentinean Carlos Brebbia and the Japanese Yosaburo Mori in 1925, the Commission's debates remained largely Eurocentric.Footnote ⁶² Technical discussions were not pursued consistently, and specific issues such as the prevention of anthrax infection, the promotion of vocational education in agriculture and the marketing of agricultural products had to be approved by both institutions as subjects for ‘suitable joint study’. When the committee reached any conclusions, they were still only forwarded in form of recommendations to the ILO's Governing Body, which was to take the necessary decisions with regard to action. Representatives of the international landworkers’ trade union complained that from a ‘social point of view’ the sessions were of ‘no interest whatsoever’.Footnote ⁶³ In fact, the Committee's target for social reform remained vague. Its agenda shifted from discussion of a broad range of issues, encompassing farm household management, the creation of allotments and the prevention of anthrax infection in flocks, to self-reflective assessments of its own work.

Unsurprisingly, the Mixed Committees’ debates initially attracted little attention in other international forums. A breakthrough in the political perception of international agrarian problems seemed in prospect in 1927, when the League of Nations put agriculture on the agenda of the International Economic Conference.Footnote ⁶⁴ In preparation for the Conference, the League's Economic and Financial Organisation formed a sub-committee on agricultural questions with a mission to collect statistical data on agricultural production, prices, and consumption in specific regions, and to address questions of international co-operation and the exchange of information. The ILO and the IIA participated in the sub-committee's work by providing technical data and sending their representatives as well as a few experts from the IIA. On the basis of the committee's work, the conference emphasised, in an unprecedented report, the great importance of agriculture in world trade, and asserted the interdependence of agricultural, industrial and commercial activities.Footnote ⁶⁵ It drew attention to the wider consequences of economic problems in the agricultural sector and emphasised the vital importance of increasing agricultural production through co-operative institutions to achieve a ‘satisfactory standard of living’ and ‘a normal return’ for the labour and capital of agricultural workers.Footnote ⁶⁶ Adopting a somewhat romanticised outlook, it insisted on the importance of the agricultural population ‘to humanity’ as ‘a reservoir of energy capable of preserving the nations from the rapid human wastage which may result from any excessive growth of industry’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This view not only pointed to a growing interest in the agricultural sector in international forums, it also established a public interest in the preservation of all things rural.

The Economic Conference also drew attention to the need for further general statistical inquiries into the economic, social, financial and technical conditions of agriculture and its potential for development.Footnote ⁶⁸ Rather than exploiting the favourable international climate, the work of the ILO's Mixed Committee remained constrained by the differing agendas of its constituents, which in addition reflected the Italian Fascist regime's new surge of interest in international institutions.Footnote ⁶⁹ The meetings in Rome and Geneva, which it continued to hold throughout the inter-war years, were now largely influenced by Giuseppe de Michelis, the IIA's vociferous president from 1925, who also represented Italy in the League of Nations and on the ILO's governing body. With a strong interest in theoretical Fascism but little agricultural expertise, de Michelis took a leading role in agrarian internationalism between 1926 and 1933.Footnote ⁷⁰ A dramatic increase in financial subsidies from Mussolini's government in the mid-1920s, together with a strategic plan to use it to promote Italy's role in international economic relations, increasingly turned the IIA into a mouthpiece of the Fascist regime.Footnote ⁷¹ The imprints of Fascist ideology, its ‘ruralisation’ programmes and its idealisation of earth and peasantry, were now distinctly perceptible in the Mixed Committees’ reports, which contained frequent references to the excellence of Italy's agricultural reforms and the achievements of its corporatist system, and discussed topics such as ‘agricultural propaganda and education through the cinema’.Footnote ⁷² The IIA's political stance was never overtly criticised by the ILO, although many had deplored its hi-jacking by the Italian government from the start, most prominently the ILO director Albert Thomas.Footnote ⁷³ When the 1920s drew to a close, the ILO had made little progress in creating a platform for technical expertise on agriculture. Although it had by now identified some actors and organisations with which to co-operate and had voiced its opinions on the problems of the sector, it had not really identified a target for social reform. Rather, as co-operation was marred by a Eurocentric conflict over power and authority, possible reforms of working conditions in agriculture still awaited systematic discussion and international legislation.

The Great Depression as a catalyst for transnational agricultural co-operation

After a decade of relative prosperity, the world economic breakdown of the late 1920s was to have a profound effect on the international perception of agricultural problems. Following the Wall Street collapse in 1929 the gloom deepened within an already acutely depressed market, affecting almost every branch of agricultural trade and production on a worldwide scale. Although most economic historians have blamed monetary shocks for the ‘Great Slump’ of 1929–33, some have also emphasised the poor economic state of the agricultural sector and especially the knock-on effect of agricultural price decline due to overproduction, which by 1930 had spilled over into other sectors of the economy and gained a global dimension.Footnote ⁷⁴ The primary consequence of the Depression was unemployment on an unprecedented scale. In the agricultural sector, collapsing demand and falling prices, together with ongoing mechanisation and rationalisation of agricultural processes, made labour especially precarious.Footnote ⁷⁵ Alarmed, the Agricultural Service used the International Labour Review to highlight the severe social consequences of the economic situation, such as the fall in agricultural wages, both monetary and in kind, a shift from waged to family labour, the lack of social protection against unemployment, and the widening gap between agricultural and industrial living standards, including housing and leisure facilities.Footnote ⁷⁶ Most worryingly of all, the Depression had halted the progress of any legislation to protect land workers.Footnote ⁷⁷ In order to assess statistically how agricultural workers were being affected by the crisis in various countries, the Agricultural Service compiled a questionnaire on the ‘consequences of the agricultural crisis’ for the wages, employment and living conditions of agricultural workers.Footnote ⁷⁸ The questionnaire was, rather surprisingly, rejected by Thomas, who argued that the term ‘agricultural crisis’ first needed to be internationally defined and described.Footnote ⁷⁹

In view of the increasingly tense state of international diplomatic relations, further exacerbated by protectionist European policies, a meeting of experts in agricultural economy summoned from twenty-four countries by the League's Economic Committee, with the assistance of the IIA, did exactly what Thomas had wished.Footnote ⁸⁰ Their report summed up the general characteristics, causes and effects of the agricultural depression and examined the market conditions for individual commodities, with the emphasis on European conditions. It focused solely on the agricultural economy, but the social dimension of the findings could hardly be ignored. Mass unemployment and poverty had spread to the countryside and the Depression had exacerbated problems such as overcrowding and poor health. These problems were further publicised at the European Conference on Rural Hygiene, organised by the League of Nations’ Health Organisation in 1931.Footnote ⁸¹ Convened to discuss how rural healthcare could be improved, the conference also considered the issue of rural housing, on which the Agricultural Service contributed key information.Footnote ⁸²

The severity of the problems affecting agricultural workers almost everywhere, and the growing importance of rural reforms for the general health and economy of nations, highlighted the need for a specialist committee which would concern itself with agricultural work only and promote its inclusion in the conference's agenda. At its fifty-seventh session, in April 1933, the Governing Body of the ILO approved a suggestion from Oersted that whenever ‘occasion should arise’, the Governing Body's representative on the Mixed Advisory Agricultural Committee should be summoned in order to examine the problems of agricultural work.Footnote ⁸³ The Sub-Committee on Agricultural Work, as it came to be known, was also authorised to summon expert assistance on specific issues. However, since the sub-committee comprised the same group of delegates already sitting in the Mixed Committee, it hardly offered the platform for ‘fresh discussion’ long sought by both national and international associations.Footnote ⁸⁴ Rather, even before its inception it was criticised for its lack of practicality, transparency and co-operation with agricultural associations.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Sub-Committee on Agricultural Work did not meet until September 1934, when it set itself to consider the consequences of the agricultural crisis for agricultural labour, particularly the problem of unemployment and a possible reduction in working hours.Footnote ⁸⁶ It addressed the problems only tentatively and with little efficiency. Notably, it failed to improve procedures for the consultation of experts. Thus, although the Great Depression had created an acute awareness of the gaps in existing national and international labour legislation, the fragmentation of existing platforms into ad hoc sub-committees had only delayed the establishment of a permanent body.

Towards an understanding of global social problems in agriculture: The Permanent Agricultural Committee

By 1935, the ILO presented a rather mixed record with regard to its original aim of internationalising agricultural labour problems and protecting agricultural workers. Issues of agricultural labour had been touched upon by different international bodies without leading to a systematic discussion. The Mixed Advisory Agricultural Committee ‘shuffled along’ without making any headway.Footnote ⁸⁷ Its main output over the last five years had been two joint investigations of the exodus from the countryside in Germany and Czechoslovakia, which displayed an anxiety about rural decline, geographical mobility and depopulation.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although the main causes of the so-called rural decline were examined in detail and summarised as lying in the economic ‘difference between the conditions of life in town and country’, the reports contained few suggestions for possible reforms.

A definite turning-point with regard to the international perception of agricultural problems came in the same year, when the relationship between agriculture and public health received a good deal of publicity. On 11 September 1935, Stanley M. Bruce, Australian delegate to the League of Nations and distinguished international statesman, speaking on behalf of the British Commonwealth, addressed the sixteenth League Assembly calling for a ‘marriage of health and agriculture’. Based on scientific findings from the 1930s concerning nutritional deficiencies and the importance of ‘protective foods’ such as milk, fruit, vegetables, potatoes and butter and their impact on health and poverty, Bruce suggested using nutrition as a ‘lever to lift agriculture, and eventually the whole world economy, out of depression’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Following Bruce's proposal, the League set up a scientific committee on nutrition that devised minimum dietary standards and published a final report on the relation of nutrition to health, agriculture and economic policy.Footnote ⁹⁰

The novel ideas on nutrition and agriculture soon transferred to the ILO, and the discussions on agricultural labour were to benefit from this innovative and comprehensive approach. Under the leadership of Thomas's British successor, Harold Butler, the ILO returned to the question of establishing a permanent technical body at its nineteenth session in 1935. Although he was no longer president of the IIA, it was again de Michelis who proposed the creation of a tripartite agricultural committee with a view to ‘facilitating the decisions of the Governing Body and developing the work of the conference in connection with agricultural labour’.Footnote ⁹¹ Approved by the Governing Body in November 1936, the first tripartite expert commission on agricultural work, the Permanent Agricultural Committee, was set up for a period of three years. However, it did not meet for its first session until February 1938, by which time its Italian promoter had withdrawn from the ILO. In spite of some continuity in terms of membership,Footnote ⁹² the Permanent Agricultural Committee was distinctly different from its predecessors. Unlike the ILO's other agricultural committees, it included a large body of forty-two representatives from organisations of agricultural employers and agricultural workers, social agricultural experts, representatives of international institutions, and members of the Governing Body.Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, the appointment of ad hoc experts reflected both the ILO's increasing extra-European membership since the mid-1930s and its renewed interest in agricultural labour during the Depression. While all the regular members were European delegates, many of them from national farmers’ and agricultural workers’ unions, the Committee's innovative strength lay in its inclusion of agricultural experts from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Australia, India, Japan and China.Footnote ⁹⁴

The opening debate of the Permanent Agricultural Committee, a general discussion on problems of agricultural labour, signalled an important shift in international approaches to agricultural questions. It was based on a series of unprecedented national reports on regional and local conditions. At Butler's request these had been submitted by the experts and placed at the disposal of the other committee members. Thirty to fifty pages long, the reports included a general survey of social problems in agriculture, statistical data and chapters on specialised topics such as child labour and unemployment. Emanating from countries as diverse as Switzerland, Yugoslavia, the USA, Brazil, Japan, China and India, they offered a wealth of hitherto unavailable information for the Agricultural Services and rich material for debate. An evident lack of protection against unemployment, sickness, invalidity, old age, low wages, and excessive hours of work emerged as common to most countries. Another common theme was the stigma and lower social standing attaching to agricultural workers in comparison to their industrial counterparts. The reports also uncovered a whole new set of social issues and unexpected similarities between European and non-European countries. For example, experts such as André Borel, Vice-Director of the Swiss Peasants’ Union, and Eiichi Sakata, an agricultural engineer in the Japanese Department of Agriculture and Forestry, highlighted the plight of rural domestic servants. Rural servants, they explained, ‘belonged’ to a family; they received food and lodgings but were not adequately paid and therefore remained bound to their masters and unable to afford an independent lifestyle.Footnote ⁹⁵

Unsurprisingly, given the geographical scope of the enquiry, the basic problem of defining ‘agricultural labour’ was soon raised. One expert in particular marked the discussions with his innovative vision: the Australian farmer and economist Frank McDougall. McDougall had sat on the economic committee of the League of Nations as Bruce's adviser, and challenged the ILO's previous focus on waged agricultural labour.Footnote ⁹⁶ He called for a new definition of ‘agricultural labour’, arguing that the term should not be restricted to paid agricultural workers but should encompass the much larger segment of unwaged agricultural labourers.Footnote ⁹⁷ While ‘agricultural workers’ referred to a small minority of paid workers in Europe and the Western hemisphere, McDougall used the term ‘peasants’ to refer to the social conditions and living standards of the global rural community as a whole. Backed by the Chinese and Indian experts, Prof. S. Wang, ex-Director of the Agricultural Department of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang, and Mian Afzal Husain, Principal of Punjab Agricultural College,Footnote ⁹⁸ McDougall forcefully urged the Permanent Agricultural Committee to consider this global community. Drawing on his recent involvement in the League's Nutrition Committee, McDougall put great emphasis on the link between agricultural and health problems and urged the ILO and the League to co-operate on questions of nutrition. The pursuit of better nutrition, McDougall asserted, would lead to an increase in the demand for foodstuffs, and an increase in demand for foodstuffs would stimulate greater agricultural activity.Footnote ⁹⁹ Food, labour, health and the economy were thus connected in a much more integrated and universalist approach to social agricultural problems. At the same time, the discussion recognised the particularities of agricultural labour and marked a decisive shift away from the ILO's previous attempts at creating analogous conditions to industrial labour. In view of the wide-ranging questions raised by McDougall, the Permanent Committee concluded that a thorough preliminary study was needed to assess the ILO's responsibility for raising the living standards of the agricultural population as a whole.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Even this first broad examination of unwaged labour differed considerably from debates on similar subjects in other institutions. Thanks to the significant input of external experts from Asia and Latin America, the Permanent Agricultural Committee was free from the imperialist undertones which prevailed, for instance, in the League of Nations’ slavery commissions for most of the inter-war years.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The establishment of a permanent body was rightly hailed by the International Labour Office as a stepping-stone to an ‘international treatment of the social problems of the countryside’.Footnote ¹⁰² Technical considerations finally outweighed petty controversies over organisational power and authority, and the report and debates of the Committee were relevant enough to be published in a remarkable study entitled ‘Social Problems in Agriculture’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Although the authors announced that this was only to be the first in a series of monographs on the subject, the onset of international hostilities delayed any further work.

Like that of other technical commissions, the work of ILO's Permanent Agricultural Committee came to an untimely halt. Although the war caused the postponement of the International Labour Conference's regular sessions it did not bring the ILO's work to a standstill. As its headquarters were moved to Montreal for safety reasons, the ILO went through a period of reorientation and programmatic rethinking. Unlike the League of Nations and the IIA, the ILO managed to survive the war and find a place in the post-war international system as a specialised agency of the United Nations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Permanent Agricultural Committee itself was reconstituted during the war after the meeting of the International Labour Conference in Philadelphia in 1944. The Conference's objectives, directed towards the improvement of living standards and working conditions on a global scale, marked the beginning of a new, global era in the history of the ILO.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ At the special request of Asian countries, the Permanent Agricultural Committee was asked to provide services for governments interested in modernising their agriculture. Ad hoc experts such as McDougall went on to play a defining role in shaping post-war international programmes and institutions in the field of agriculture. The Committee became closely connected with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), of which McDougall was one of the founders.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In 1947 and 1949, the Committee made a substantial contribution to the formulation of a comprehensive programme of work for the ILO on social security, vocational training, hours of work, manpower and employment, and safety and hygiene for rural workers. In the immediate post-war years, all the Regional Conferences also paid special attention to agricultural issues, which were seen as crucial to the economic development of ‘underdeveloped’ countries.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ While the idea of development indicated a conceptual shift in the ILO's work, none of the questions raised were entirely new. They relied on over twenty years of tentative endeavours to secure an improvement in the conditions of life and work in agriculture during which the special needs of agricultural workers were, if not met, at least identified.