Introduction
In the interwar years, the compilation of international agricultural statistics to quantify the existence and production of food staples and key commodities on a global scale became one of the major features of multilateral agricultural cooperation. Globalization of trade and increasing regional interdependency made the centralization and circulation of information on agricultural resources a central preoccupation of governments and of international organizations. Testimony to this growing reliance on data was the compilation between 1925 and 1930 of a World Agricultural Census – a worldwide inventory of agricultural production including crops, livestock, rural labour, and the use of animal and mechanical power.
This article provides a first history of the census by exploring how the project emerged from the connections between various institutions, notably the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome (IIA), the International Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington, DC. Largely financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, but placed under the authority of the IIA, the census was part of what historians have recently described as the efforts of interwar national and international institutions to promote technical and scientific cooperation and knowledge production and to facilitate international economic coordination and planning.Footnote 1
The article argues that the census embodied a new and ambitious attempt at producing knowledge on agriculture that went beyond the well-established imperial and transatlantic exchanges of agricultural expertise upon which much of the historical literature has focused.Footnote 2 The survey was placed under the auspices of an international institution but depended on the cooperation of national statistical offices and authorities. Unlike previous late nineteenth-century scientific and social inquiries, for the first time the collection and dissemination of agricultural statistics were carried out simultaneously and on a global scale. The 1930 census was an exercise in international standardization and a means to reflect on uniform categories. It was also an opportunity to ensure that participating countries would share a common language and understanding of agricultural production.
Like other interwar international surveys, the census was prepared and implemented at a time when food security, international competition, and agricultural modernization emerged as central geopolitical concerns in interstate relations.Footnote 3 As prices for agricultural commodities fell after the First World War, the need for statistical data on agricultural production to assess global resources and plan production appeared more urgent than ever. Especially for the US, agricultural statistics became central to how it managed domestic as well as international supply and demand, and how it planned modernization programmes that would find their apogee in post-war agricultural development projects such as the Green Revolution.Footnote 4 Thus, although the census was seemingly universal in scope and responded to a well-established international demand for data, it was primarily shaped by the scientific expertise of the USDA, and by the outlook of its main financial supporter, the Rockefeller Foundation. This raises the question as to how far the survey was part of a search for multilateral understanding in agricultural affairs and of internationalist efforts at cooperation on scientific and social policy matters, and how far it simply reflected American attempts at expanding their hegemonic interests and their industrialized model of agriculture.Footnote 5
As this article shows, the census’s blueprint was the work of its director, the American farmer and former Chief of Statistics of the USDA, Leon Estabrook (1869–1937). Estabrook – whose international role as an agricultural expert has completely fallen into oblivion – left a rich personal record of his life and career, including a three-year-long round-the-world trip to secure global cooperation for his census project.Footnote 6 By examining how Estabrook’s vision of economic development and scientific planning was shaped and redefined by his national background and his transnational engagement, the article sheds light on the power and the limits of ‘Americanization’ of global agricultural expertise in the interwar years.Footnote 7 It uncovers the political manoeuvrings and negotiations that were necessary to move forward with the project, and assesses the survey’s outcome against the backdrop of the global economic downturn of the 1930s. By doing so, it illustrates the complex role played by individual experts in connecting national and international institutions, and in imprinting their own perspectives on international projects that necessitated cooperation and compromise.Footnote 8
Institutional origins
In the interwar years, the use of quantitative data and statistical expertise to express forms of scientifically backed objectivity emerged as key factors in the framing of a large set of international economic and social issues ranging from immigration, currency, and trade, to consumption, birth rates, and nutrition.Footnote 9 The increasingly transnational and global scope of statistical surveys as tools of ‘economic measurement’ to be used by planners and policymakers extended to the agrarian sector, albeit with specific challenges.Footnote 10 The IIA – established in Rome in 1905 by the American merchant and businessman David Lubin (1849–1919) – was the leading agency promoting the production and circulation of agricultural data.Footnote 11 The organization aimed to facilitate agricultural cooperation between its more than seventy European and non-European member states by circulating uniform statistics on economic aspects of production and by diffusing knowledge about new agricultural technologies.Footnote 12 Through the publication of regular bulletins such as the International Yearbook of Food and Agricultural Statistics (1910–45/6), the Statistical Bulletin, and the International Yearbook of Agricultural Legislation (1911–45), the IIA intended to offer ‘up-to-date statistics of sufficient vitality to influence current prices’.Footnote 13 The aim was to curb the circulation of false news regarding the prospects for crops and the manipulation of prices, thus facilitating trade relations between producing and consuming states.Footnote 14
Although the IIA’s publications were widely accepted as the international reference, their number, geographical scope, and comparative potential was limited. Regional differences in farming methods and harvesting periods, as well as a bewildering variety of farm types and cultivated crops, undermined the production of data that could be analysed and compared internationally.Footnote 15 Even within national contexts, such as Italy, agricultural economists regarded agrarian statistics as generally unreliable.Footnote 16 For example, in order for timber statistics to be representative, the data had to be based on a common nomenclature and uniform units of measurement, and be compiled during a single period of observation.Footnote 17 Such processes of standardization were still marginal in the agricultural sector and by 1920, out of nearly two hundred countries in the world (including colonies), ‘only 37’ had taken an agricultural census since 1900, at different times and with widely varying methods.Footnote 18
However, before the First World War, the importance of international statistics on agricultural resources, production, trade, and consumption had already been publically recognized at various national and international meetings. Plans to launch an international survey were, for example, expressed by the IIA in its General Assembly meetings – the institution’s legislative body that comprised delegations from every member country and that met every two years – in 1909, 1911, and 1913. But it was only in the 1920s, against a backdrop of post-war economic readjustment of agricultural markets and the collapse of wheat prices, that the idea received a wider backing and the necessary financial support.
Following the war, a growing imbalance of global supply and demand, and worsening terms of trade for agricultural produce, lent new relevance – especially in American eyes – to the IIA’s activities.Footnote 19 The devastation caused by warfare both to farming landscapes and to human labour resources had led to the disruption of global trade relations and dramatic falls in production in European countries.Footnote 20 This gave rise to an unprecedented demand for American farm products, particularly wheat and meat, which spurred American farmers to buy land to increase their production and invest in machinery.Footnote 21 From 1921 onwards, however, agricultural production in Europe, and especially wheat production in the Soviet Union, recovered. As a result, the United States in particular was hit by a decline in demand, lower prices for its European exports, and growing competition from Canada and Argentina.Footnote 22
Faced with the collapse of wheat prices, the United States experienced a ‘farm crisis’ that forced farmers to leave the land, with profound effects on the nation’s agricultural economy. In response, American economists prioritized the collection of updated agricultural statistics – especially on wheat – as a crucial aspect of post-war economic planning.Footnote 23 It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the key financial and scientific contributions for a worldwide census of agriculture in the early 1920s came from two of the leading American institutions in the field of agricultural science and research: the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and the USDA in Washington, DC.
The Rockefeller Foundation had a long history of supporting scientific research that could be applied to social and practical problems in rural areas, especially regarding education and public health but also concerning agriculture.Footnote 24 One of the Foundation’s goals was to achieve progress by promoting statistical inquiries and supporting institutions that were working towards international standardization. The USDA, on the other hand, was one of the world’s leading governmental agencies for agricultural research.Footnote 25 Established in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, it was responsible for developing and executing government policy on farming, agriculture, forestry, and food, including animal husbandry, insect control, nutrition, irrigation, seed quality, and plant breeding.Footnote 26 It boasted a highly developed statistical division consisting of a nationwide network of volunteer crop reporters and specialized observers, called field agents.Footnote 27 It also shared with the Rockefeller Foundation a commitment to technological innovation and greater productivity through policy-oriented research.Footnote 28
In 1923 the Rockefeller Foundation created the so-called International Education Board to promote the scientific endeavours of universities, research institutes, and promising individuals within a transatlantic context. The board was placed under the leadership of Wickliffe Rose (1862–1931), who had served the Foundation in various capacities such as through his involvement in the campaign to eradicate hookworms in the southern United States.Footnote 29 In the winter of 1923, Rose carried out a four-month survey of fundable European institutions, during which, supported by information from agricultural economists at the USDA, he identified the IIA as a vehicle for ‘agricultural advancement’ and a platform for international exchange.Footnote 30
The USDA had a specific interest in further developing the IIA’s existing crop-reporting systems. From the 1920s onwards, quantification on a nationwide scale dominated the efforts of a new group of USDA economists, and states were asked to produce forecasts of production.Footnote 31 The USDA economist Louis G. Michael, for instance, insisted that it was crucially important for America’s export economy to develop the IIA ‘along American lines’.Footnote 32 He saw the IIA as an opportunity for the US to further increase its access to worldwide information on acreage and production of crops, as well as on weather conditions affecting harvests.Footnote 33
This new American interest in the IIA was matched by a growing number of American delegates being sent to the IIA’s General Assembly. Whereas, in 1920, three American delegates made the trip to Rome, three years later their number had increased to eleven, including USDA statisticians, economists, plant pathologists, and meteorologists.Footnote 34 By 1922 the Americans had proposed an ‘American’ programme for the Institute which centred on the proposal that English – in addition to the established French – should become an official language of the IIA.Footnote 35 One man in particular, the American agricultural economist Asher Hobson (1889–1992), who was an associate professor of economic agriculture at Columbia University and assistant chief of the Office of Farm Management at the USDA, played a key role in increasing American influence in Rome. Between 1922 and 1932 he acted as the permanent American delegate to the Institute.Footnote 36
From the beginning of his tenure, Hobson lobbied his professional network in Washington to take an active interest in the IIA’s activity. Not only did he instigate the census project, but he also hoped to invite agricultural economists working in American colleges and experiment stations to the Italian capital for sabbaticals that would enable them to share knowledge with European colleagues.Footnote 37 Although this plan did not fully materialize, Hobson succeeded in bringing a few leading social scientists, notably the influential agricultural economist Henry Charles Taylor (1873–1969), chief of the newly created USDA Bureau of Agricultural Economics, to visit the IIA.Footnote 38 In 1923, as a result of extended negotiations over American financial subsidies between Hobson and the International Education Board, the latter agreed to sponsor the IIA over a five-year period with two grants: a fund of US$39,000 for the reorganization of the Institute’s library and for the training of ‘more efficient’ library staff, and a contribution of US$50,000 for the implementation of a worldwide statistical survey.Footnote 39 While the IIA promised to take charge of the costs of international meetings and publications, the Rockefeller money was to be used for the preparation of the census, and specifically for the defrayment of the project director’s wages and travel expenses.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s financial support for the census project had a variety of objectives. Officially, it was intended to strengthen the existing technical and scientific competence of the IIA. The project was also very much in line with Rockefeller practice of launching censuses as tools of data production that could be put to use for social engineering.Footnote 40 Raymond Fosdick – a board member of the International Education Board and later president of the Foundation – ‘heartily approved’ of the project, which confirmed his belief that global improvements could only be achieved by appraising global resources.Footnote 41 Last but not least, the census catered to the interests of the USDA and to the latter’s increasing concerns with identifying areas of agricultural surplus and deficiency.
With the money for the project secured, the discussion turned to who would be in charge of appointing its leader. Hobson, who continued to liaise between the IIA and the USDA, stressed in his correspondence with Rose that the appointment of the director of the census should ‘rest in American hands’ to guarantee the ‘efficient’ management of the project.Footnote 42 He successfully proposed that the USDA should submit a list of candidates from which the Permanent Committee of the IIA – the governing body set up to carry out the policies suggested by its General Assembly – would then choose the appropriate individual. As it turned out, the list suggested by the USDA at first included no American expert but eminent European statisticians instead. The top candidate was the Italian professor of economics and expert on agricultural statistics Umberto Ricci, the former head of the statistical office of the IIA, and the author of a standard work on international agricultural statistics.Footnote 43 Other candidates included the agricultural consultant to the Hungarian Royal Ministry of Agriculture, Ivan Nagy, and the chiefs of the statistical bureaus of Sweden and Norway, Ernst Jonas Höijer and Gunnar Yahn, all internationally renowned authorities in the field.Footnote 44
None of these experts, however, was seriously considered for the position. Ricci, who later exiled himself in opposition to Mussolini’s regime, withdrew his candidature, officially because of other engagements. The other candidates were all dropped, apparently because of insufficient application materials or unsatisfactory credentials.Footnote 45 In the end, the man appointed to the post was a surprise candidate who was not on the initial list, but was suggested by Hobson during the sessions of the Permanent Committee: Leon Estabrook, a farmer and agricultural statistician who had been chosen on the grounds of his long experience in USDA crop-reporting services, and his recent mission to Argentina as a USDA envoy.Footnote 46 Though there are no surviving sources about the reasons why Estabrook was chosen, it is highly likely that this was the result of political manoeuvring by Hobson in agreement with USDA officials.
Having an American member of the USDA posted at the IIA fit the pattern of the Rockefeller Foundation’s sponsorship of international forums, which provided opportunities for US elites to promote their positions at an international level despite the fact that the US did not join the League of Nations.Footnote 47 There was no objection from the IIA’s Permanent Committee. On the contrary, Britain, which was one of the leading forces within the committee and had long supported attempts at international quantification, enthusiastically endorsed the appointment, not least because Rockefeller support meant limited expenses for the IIA. The British delegate, Sir Thomas Henry Elliott (1854–1926), lauded America’s ‘generosity’ towards the Institute.Footnote 48 In the years to come, however, not everyone at the IIA would be so enthusiastic and the census would create frictions within the scientific community of agricultural experts.
Expertise made in America
Leon Estabrook’s appointment as the director of the census project made him part of an eclectic international group of interwar agricultural experts that included soil scientists, dairy and animal husbandry specialists, horticulturalists, statisticians, and agricultural economists. Unlike many of these international experts – such as the British nutritionist Boyd Orr, who had a degree in biology and medicine, or the Australian economist Frank McDougall – Estabrook was in many ways atypical. He had received no proper scientific training and became involved in international cooperation comparatively late, towards the end of his career. In fact, in 1925 when rumours started to circulate in Washington that Estabrook was to take on the directorship of the census, the Manufacturers’ Record, a weekly magazine devoted to promoting the industrial, financial, and commercial interests of the South, was outraged ‘that a man who had worked on a farm until he was 21 with little or no schooling had been appointed … in preference to numerous university competitors’.Footnote 49
Raised on a small Texas farm in a family too poor to send him to school, Estabrook, by his own account, resembled the archetype of the American self-made man. As a boy he had taught himself to read and write, devouring literary classics as well as history books, a passion that would continue throughout his life. He also adopted the habit of studying mathematics at night, often rehearsing the problems while working in the field during the day.Footnote 50 While in his twenties, he left the family farm for Washington, where he attended night classes in law and science and learned shorthand reporting. Having successfully passed the civil service examination, he began working as a stenographer at the War Department, before moving to the USDA in 1904.Footnote 51
During the following two decades, Estabrook witnessed the USDA’s expansion into a leading global institution of scientific and applied agricultural research, and gained first-hand knowledge of many of the USDA’s offices.Footnote 52 He first worked as a clerk in the Bureau of Plant Industry, where he acquainted himself with what he called the ‘clique’ of well-travelled USDA scientists such as the plant pathologists and global explorers Beverly Galloway and David Fairchild.Footnote 53 From 1909 onwards Estabrook worked at the Office of Seed Distribution, where he was in charge of selecting, buying, testing, and selling American and European seeds.Footnote 54 In 1913, together with a group of agricultural economists and statisticians, he took part in the reorganization of the USDA’s crop-reporting service. This experience led to his appointment as Chief of the Bureau of Crop Estimates, the USDA office concerned with collecting and analysing statistics.Footnote 55
In contrast to the new generation of college-educated businessmen, engineers, and economists who came to dominate agricultural policies in the 1920s, Estabrook was very much a nineteenth-century man, who had lived through a deep agricultural crisis and who had witnessed the transformation of America’s rural landscape from traditional to industrial agriculture. A declared non-partisan, he shared with the late nineteenth-century Populist movement a belief in science and technology as a gateway to rural modernity. He also shared Populist confidence in the progressive power of education and self-education, as well as an awareness that farming as a business depended on the world market and on international production and consumption.Footnote 56 As the owner of a farm in Maryland and an active member of the National Grange – the leading American farmers’ organization – he prided himself on his first-hand experience of rural life, and dismissed the narrow-mindedness of modern agricultural technocrats who lacked practical knowhow.Footnote 57 At the same time, however, Estabrook’s scientific conception of agricultural research – like that of his younger colleague Hobson – was imbued with the USDA’s credo of ‘practical science’, the optimization of cultivation through seed selection, soil science, and the use of fertilizers.Footnote 58 This belief in making agriculture ‘economically profitable’ went together with a belief in the power of statistics. ‘Statistics’, he professed ‘may be dry and dead as mummies, uninteresting to mediocre minds, but intensely interesting to people blessed with imagination, who understand that statistics are simply the magic symbols and formulas that represent the life of a planet in its relation to humanity.’Footnote 59
Estabrook’s convictions were strengthened by the experience of the First World War and of Hoover’s wartime Food Administration, which revealed both the strategic importance of food for warfare and a lack of American data and knowledge about global food supplies.Footnote 60 Before the war, he had already advocated that the USDA should employ crop experts ‘at strategic points in agricultural regions in competition with the agriculture of the United States’ to keep the department’s statisticians constantly informed of the conditions and prospects of competitors.Footnote 61 He dabbled in the compilation of ‘world agricultural statistics’ by using the available data of some of the leading agricultural economies of the world to chart their production, imports, exports, excess stocks, and deficiencies.Footnote 62 He also participated in setting up a ‘field force’ of trained field agents who would help the American government forecast domestic production. In 1923, as a result of this work, he was sent to Argentina as a consultant of the USDA to reorganize the Argentinian bureau of economics and statistics – a mission that was very much in line with the wider US strategy of increasing American influence in Latin America and building political and cultural ties through professional and voluntary advisory missions.Footnote 63 Between early 1923 and the summer of 1924, Estabrook travelled across Argentina, compiling statistical data and a lengthy report on the state of agricultural production in the country, which he later supplied to the USDA as well as to the Argentinian government.Footnote 64
The majority of agricultural economists within the USDA sought to improve agricultural production by modernizing methods of cultivation in order to ensure an abundance of produce and to secure a certain standard of living for American farmers.Footnote 65 Unlike them, Estabrook was obsessed with problems concerning supply and demand, and he predicted that the challenge that governments would face would not be how to produce more but how to deal with agricultural ‘surpluses that could not find an outlet’.Footnote 66 Accordingly, the real challenge for America’s farming economy in the mid 1920s was to sustain its competitive advantage over other nations. This could be done, he suggested, by finding out how the global market for American key export staples would evolve, especially in regard to wheat and cotton, which were also linked to the development of domestic storage and transportation infrastructure.Footnote 67 Nevertheless, Estabrook initially hesitated to accept the direction of the census, which he feared would distance him from his wife (who disapproved of his long absence), his circle of friends, and his professional network. Urged by Hobson and Taylor, he finally accepted a move to Rome on the grounds that running the survey would constitute ‘a distinguished public service’ rendered to his home country and to the wider world.Footnote 68 Despite doubts about having to learn French and Italian to communicate with fellow experts, Estabrook also imagined that the service would be advantageous for his further career in Washington.Footnote 69 He viewed the census as a means to learn about other types of agriculture but also as a way of increasing American influence in the shaping of international agricultural expertise. In the years that followed, his international engagement would remain deeply informed by his national background.
Designing the survey
In the spring of 1925, work on the census started in earnest with Estabrook’s move to Rome and the establishment of a census bureau in one of the outbuildings of the IIA in the park of the Villa Borghese.Footnote 70 Although the new office was supposed to draw on the IIA’s human resources, it was very much a one-man show, with only one secretary to help the director with administrative tasks.Footnote 71 As Estabrook quickly discovered, the IIA was suffering from internal problems and administrative confusion. Despite the determination of the British and American delegations to promote the Institute’s international relevance, the number of adhering states was a mystery even to insiders. Out of the seventy participating countries, only about twenty to twenty-five delegates actually attended the IIA’s meetings.Footnote 72 A great majority of those who did attend were diplomats accredited to the Italian government and posted in Rome but who had little knowledge of agricultural affairs.Footnote 73
There were additional difficulties, mostly stemming from the local dynamics in Rome. Only a few weeks after Estabrook’s arrival in June 1925, Mussolini launched his ‘battle for wheat’ campaign, which aimed to increase domestic wheat production in order to achieve self-sufficiency. This was accompanied by massive propaganda and an increase in import tariffs.Footnote 74 The full extent of fascist policies of autarky, which resulted in a new set of agrarian institutions, rural policies, and scientific experimentation in crop development, would only reveal itself in the late 1930s.Footnote 75 But from the summer of 1925 onwards the IIA became the object of a new surge of Italian interest and a dramatic increase in financial subsidies from Mussolini’s government.Footnote 76 In July 1925, the appointment of the regime-friendly Giuseppe De Michelis (1872–1951) as the IIA’s new president strengthened Italy’s hold on the international institution.Footnote 77 American observers voiced their concern that so-called ‘reactionary forces’ who adhered to the Fascist government’s nationalist policies, such as the Italian Secretary-General, Carlo Dragoni, and the Italian Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, Valentino Dore, were taking control of the IIA.Footnote 78
Soon the census project found itself at the centre of growing Italian–American antagonism. During the summer of 1925, Estabrook, who continued to draw a portion of his salary from the USDA, worked on drafting the census form, a questionnaire that would be used to collect information on agricultural holdings worldwide.Footnote 79 His methodology was simple. In order to determine what kind of categories would be universally useful, he analysed and compared the existing census schedules that had previously been used by member governments of the IIA.Footnote 80 He listed the available statistical data on crops and livestock according to their relative international and commercial importance (rather than botanical principles), and prioritized those crops that were sold ‘elsewhere than at the point of production’.Footnote 81
Accordingly, the most important crops were wheat and other edible cereals such as oats, barley, rye, millet, maize, and rice. Beside other plants and root crops that could be used for food and fodder, the form also focused on crops that could be used for industrial purposes, such as sugar, oil, cotton, and other fibre crops. A wide range of vegetables and orchard fruit – as well as plantation crops typically grown in tropical climates, such as coffee, tea, cocoa, black pepper, and rubber – were also listed. A major section of the questionnaire dealt with around thirty types of livestock, mainly horses, mules, asses, sheep, goats, pigs, poultry, and bees.Footnote 82 Claiming that his aim was to make the form as simple and universally understandable as possible, Estabrook excluded certain items, such as garlic and chicks, which he dismissed as being only relevant for European ‘kitchen-gardens’ and not for global commercial purposes.Footnote 83 He also structured the form ‘along Anglo-Saxon lines’, prioritizing commercial over botanical principles, and adopting the use of non-technical English terms for the various subheadings of the questionnaire rather than the Latin botanical ones that Ricci had previously established for the IIA.Footnote 84
In the autumn of 1925 Estabrook submitted his project to Secretary-General Dragoni, asking that the draft form should be circulated for comments and suggestions so that it could be further revised before being submitted for approval to the General Assembly. However, much to Estabrook’s anger, Dragoni refused to do so, arguing that the proposed classification did not conform to the IIA’s own standards. In the following weeks, the form became central to Italian and American attempts at claiming authority over the project. Thus, in late October, De Michelis took advantage of Estabrook’s temporary travels to Washington to place the project under the authority of Dore and the Institute’s own statistical service.Footnote 85 On his return in January 1926, having secured the approval of the USDA for the form during his stay in Washington, Estabrook found that the version he had originally submitted had been rearranged to comply with the IIA’s own older classification, which he dismissed as a ‘highly arbitrary’ and ‘technical’ system that ‘nobody could understand except a few technicians in Europe’.Footnote 86 Unhappy about the Italian takeover, he threatened to abandon his post and return to America, which would have compromised the funding of the International Education Board.Footnote 87 As a result, and at the insistence of Hobson, the census was granted an ‘autonomous position’, which did not mean, however, that Estabrook could act independently but that he answered directly to the international body of delegates that constituted the Permanent Committee and General Assembly rather than to the IIA’s statistical office.Footnote 88
Although De Michelis later claimed that the fallout was based on a ‘misunderstanding’, the tensions signalled that scientific cooperation, especially when concerned with matters relevant to the economy, could not be dissociated from questions of power.Footnote 89 Dore refused to lend his office’s help even for petty administrative tasks. Estabrook and Hobson, meanwhile, claimed that they were acting in the interest of the international community, while making sure that the project and the funds of the International Education Board remained firmly in American hands.Footnote 90 Information on the Italian–American power struggle even travelled back to high offices in Washington. A. R. Mann, Dean of Cornell University and a member of the Rockefeller International Education Board, wrote to the US Secretary of Agriculture, William M. Jardine, to share his concern that if ‘three or four larger powers, including the United States’, did not ‘strongly assert’ themselves against the Italians who were trying to ‘nationalize’ and ‘Italianize’ the organization, ‘the future of the Institute as a dynamic international force’ was at stake.Footnote 91 In response, Jardine briefly pondered the idea of reducing America’s financial subsidies to the IIA.Footnote 92 The plan to put financial pressure on Italian civil servants was not carried out, but the relationship between American delegates and Italian members of staff in Rome remained strained and cast a long-lasting shadow over agricultural cooperation.Footnote 93
Throughout 1926, the census form remained at the centre of international debate and negotiation. In early February, De Michelis assembled a small scientific committee of international statisticians of the Institute to discuss Estabrook’s proposal.Footnote 94 All of the experts, except for Estabrook, were European; many of them were Italians, including Dore, Dragoni, and Rodolfo Benini, a professor of statistics at the University of Rome, who acted as the committee’s president. The latter lobbied for the Italian way of collecting data by municipalities rather than by farms as suggested by Estabrook, arguing that this would offer a way to correlate results with geographical and meteorological features that ruled agricultural production.Footnote 95 Estabrook, privately convinced that American statistical expertise was the best in the world, again dismissed this as a sign of the IIA’s Eurocentricity, arguing that it showed that the assembled statisticians were ‘wholly ignorant’ of conditions in countries that did not have municipal structures.Footnote 96
The Italians were not the only ones to disagree with Estabrook’s proposal. Other experts questioned how a farm should be defined and whether livestock should be counted in winter when their number was lowest or summer when it was highest. The Czechoslovakian delegate insisted that, in addition to the sex and age of meat animals, their weight should also be listed in the census. The Latvian delegate, meanwhile, wanted to include more details on the type of farm machinery used in agriculture.Footnote 97 In a larger meeting that took place in April 1926 the draft was submitted to an international commission of statisticians and agricultural economists from as many as sixteen member countries, notably from western, southern and central Europe, North and South America, and North Africa.Footnote 98 Even within this more international framework, the tensions between Italian and American delegates ruled the debates.Footnote 99 Headed by Benini, and in open confrontation with Estabrook, the Italians continued to lobby for a more detailed survey that would include geological and topographic features, as well as data on soils and climate.Footnote 100 In late April, at the IIA’s Eighth General Assembly, an impressive American delegation composed of twelve experts, supported by the British, took matters into their own hands.Footnote 101 They ensured that there would be no Italian chairmen in the relevant commissions and that the discussions would be held in English so that Italian and other European experts who preferred French would be unable to enforce their own ideas.Footnote 102
The questionnaire on which an agreement was finally reached, however, reflected that, at least in regard to certain points, the Americans could not impose their views but had to reach a compromise. Thus, although Estabrook had originally postulated that agricultural cultivation on land less than one acre should not be counted, the main category of analysis – the farm – was broadly defined as land ‘wholly or partially used for agricultural production’, ‘operated by one person alone, or with the assistance of others, without regard to ownership, size or location’.Footnote 103 In response to certain criticisms, the questionnaire also included a whole section of supplementary questions that went beyond the narrow focus on vegetable and animal produce but centred on more technical aspects of infrastructure and technology, including the use of irrigation, fertilizers, and farm machinery. At the request of the Agricultural Service of the International Labour Organization in Geneva, the form also contained questions on farm tenure and labour.Footnote 104 Finally, a list of animals that were less relevant to international trade and food production but ‘peculiar to certain countries’ – such as camels, llamas, guanacos, reindeer, elephants, buffaloes, and ostriches – gave the census a truly global appeal.Footnote 105
Various international meetings noted the significance of such an unprecedented enquiry, notably the World Economic Conference of 1927 in Geneva, which commended the proposed census for giving ‘the statistical data of the different countries a character of uniformity which up to the present they have lacked’.Footnote 106Agreement on the various sections of the survey, which was translated into French and Spanish and distributed not only to the member states of the IIA but to all existing governments, formed only the beginning of the work. The breadth of the investigation, whose compilation (depending on the hemisphere) was scheduled to take place in 1929 and 1930, was bound to pose technical challenges. Although the choice of methodology for collecting the data was left to participating governments, these needed to be willing to invest in statistical offices and in training enumerators.Footnote 107 In order to secure international cooperation, the census director left Rome for, as he put it, a ‘semi-diplomatic’ tour of the world, during which he would personally encourage national authorities to participate in the census and offer technical advice where needed.Footnote 108 Thus, in line with Rockefeller practice, the tour was a way to explore the state of agriculture on a worldwide scale, as well as an opportunity for unofficial diplomatic interaction and the promotion of American statistical methods and practices. In the following years, this scientific enquiry was to bring the American expert into contact with a variety of local, regional, and national settings. The experience opened his eyes to the worldwide diversity of agriculture, but also led him to reflect about differences in cultural and material development on a global scale.
Launching a global inquiry
Between 1926 and 1929, sponsored by the grant of the International Education Board but following an itinerary he had personally planned, Leon Estabrook travelled all over Europe, then to North and Latin America, Asia, and Africa.Footnote 109 Between May and September 1926 alone, he visited approximately forty-six countries by train, including the capitals of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Poland, Latvia, and Russia. After a tour through the south, west and north of Europe, his travels took him to North Africa, notably Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Tripolitania, and Egypt, followed by Jerusalem, Palestine, and Lebanon in the Middle East. In early 1927 he took off to Central and South America after a short stop in North America. Later in the same year he travelled through East Asia, including Japan, Korea, and China, then to South Asia and Australasia. In 1928 he visited Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Zanzibar, and South Africa, returning to Central and South America, then North America and Europe later that year.Footnote 110
Moving from one continent to another was an increasingly common practice among relief workers, international experts, and students avid to gain an international education but, even in the age of machines and modernism, this tour of duty stood out in its ambitions to encompass the entire globe. The survey not only went far beyond other American fact-finding missions in Europe, such as the dispatch in 1912 of an American delegation under Lubin’s direction to inspect rural cooperatives, or the sending, between 1927 and 1932, of thousands of American agricultural technical experts to Soviet Russia to advise the Russian government and assess its collectivization policy.Footnote 111 The mission’s duration and global scope also foreshadowed the Rockefeller Foundation’s increasing regional activities in the field of rural modernization and development in Latin America and Asia.Footnote 112
Unlike these later projects, however, the census did not make any explicit civilizing or developmental claims for economically underdeveloped countries; instead it was formulated with the universal goal of improving knowledge on agricultural production as a contribution to ‘wealth, prosperity and welfare’ on a global scale.Footnote 113 By 1928, in spite of the protectionist approach of national agricultural policies, Estabrook had secured the participation of seventy-two countries in the survey.Footnote 114 Colonial powers such as Great Britain were ‘cooperating to the fullest possible extent’, hoping that the census would provide them with a ‘unique opportunity’ of collecting comprehensive statistics relating to imperial agriculture.Footnote 115 The census project lacked the strategic and security interest that would accompany later American development efforts, and Estabrook was allowed to travel through colonial territories as well as leading agrarian countries such as Russia.Footnote 116 Whether this was a result of a universal commitment to international cooperation or simply a reflection of governments’ self-interest in gaining access to agricultural data is difficult to assess. What is clear, however, is that, unlike other international agricultural projects, such as the establishment of phytosanitary conventions that foresaw measures to protect plants from harmful pests and thus had an impact on national import and export policies, the census was not perceived as posing a threat to national agricultural sovereignty.Footnote 117
Although the census project was not based on formal territorial assumptions, it nonetheless entailed an element of exploration and discovery that provided traits of American appropriation. It was similar to the more established genre of American botanical surveys, being designed to map unfamiliar agricultural landscapes and make them ‘legible for scientific and commercial purposes’.Footnote 118 Thus there was an inherent ambivalence in Estabrook’s mission, which sought to investigate the heterogeneity of agricultural production by stressing local specificity while at the same time imposing the idea of centralized and standardized measurement.Footnote 119
The extent to which Estabrook’s tour allowed for ‘trans-cultural engagement’ and for in-depth and close observation of local agricultural practices and conditions is debatable, given the pace of his travel.Footnote 120 His relentless journeys over sea and land, primarily by steamship and train, were punctuated by a series of short stopovers of three or four days, mainly in the capital cities.Footnote 121 The routine of these visits left little to chance and relied on an existing global network of American expatriates. Upon arrival in a new place, Estabrook’s first point of contact was usually the American consulate, through which he arranged a string of meetings and interviews with local agricultural officials, statisticians, and ministers, and also with American missionaries and technical advisers who lived and worked locally.Footnote 122 Discussions with these public and private figures concerned the particulars of domestic production, the extent of exploitation, the difficulties of generating data and predicting future development, and the possibilities of creating or improving existing statistics. The repetitive pattern and formality of these meetings was punctuated by visits to local botanical gardens and agricultural experiment stations, which many agricultural specialists at the time regarded as the pinnacle of agricultural research.Footnote 123
Estabrook had started out with an open mind as to his encounter with agriculture ‘on strange soil, in strange climates, and with strange practices’, but during his travels his understanding of global agriculture came to be increasingly conceptualized along developmental lines.Footnote 124 Confronted with widely varying and, as he put it, often ‘primitive’ and ‘medieval’ agricultural techniques that relied on ‘excessive use of human labour’, he reflected on the potential for improvement based on the model of American modernization and of his experience of the transformative powers of industrial technologies.Footnote 125 Rural America had recently undergone, and was still experiencing, a dramatic set of technological changes, notably the increasing mechanization of farm labour, which affected the structure of farms and of agricultural production more generally.Footnote 126 Estabrook regarded this new type of industrialized agriculture as inherently superior to the traditional practices he witnessed in foreign countries. He also lauded America’s use of new technologies such as refrigeration that helped to keep ‘the American abundance of fruit and vegetables of the finest quality … in prime condition’ compared to the produce he saw on foreign market stalls.Footnote 127
This focus on industrialization and technology gave rise to certain assumptions about the state of scientific, as well as cultural and material, development across the globe. Estabrook thus divided the world into two distinct groups based on the development of statistical offices and methods. The first group, with the necessary funds and infrastructure, predictably encompassed ‘practically all of Europe’ and ‘all of North America’, as well as some colonial dependencies in Africa and South East Asia and a few South American countries. In contrast, the second group consisted of countries such as Borneo, New Guinea, Jamaica, and Haiti, as well as Mozambique, Abyssinia, Afghanistan, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Arabia, in which agriculture was ‘undeveloped’ and where, ‘even with the best spirit of cooperation on the part of responsible officials’, results were classified as ‘doubtful, because of inherent difficulties in obtaining definite data’.Footnote 128
In August 1929, Estabrook completed his tour and returned to what he called his ‘official family’ in Rome.Footnote 129 Confident about the success of his mission, he claimed to have secured the cooperation of countries that covered ‘98 per cent of the land surface and population of the globe, and probably more than 99 per cent of the total world agricultural and livestock production’.Footnote 130 A few months earlier, in November and December 1928, the International Conference on Economic Statistics held in Geneva under the auspices of the League of Nations had officially paid tribute to Estabrook’s project by elevating it to a treaty provision, thus establishing the compilation of regular worldwide agricultural surveys as a key feature of international agricultural cooperation.Footnote 131 The conference also recognized that the census form adopted by the IIA would serve as ‘a valuable guide’ for the future.Footnote 132
Surprisingly, however, Estabrook received little recognition for his achievement from the three institutions involved in the survey. The census director had already felt left alone with his ambitions during his travels, despite sending a continuous stream of reports and letters to the USDA and the IIA. In contrast to his meticulous compilation of information on individual countries’ agricultural development and reporting systems, the official acknowledgments he received were so rare that he felt as if ‘Washington and Rome’ were just ‘shadows’, and the IIA and the USDA ‘simply a dream’.Footnote 133 Upon his return to Rome, the American expert felt purposely ignored and he soon realized that the relations between Washington and Rome had taken a turn for the worse. Indeed, communication between the State Department and the IIA had deteriorated to the point that Hobson had resigned and the US was withdrawing its membership.Footnote 134 What Arthur Sweetser, the American representative at the League of Nations, qualified as a ‘breach between Washington and Rome’ not only marginalized Estabrook with regard to his Washington network but also shattered any prospects of the Institute gaining a follow-up grant from the International Education Board.Footnote 135 Indeed, the IIA’s requests for additional financial support were turned down.Footnote 136 What is more, by the time that Estabrook had settled back into his Roman office, ready to synthesize the knowledge he had gained over the past five years, a whole set of new challenges awaited international economists and statisticians.
Crisis and outcome
The stock market crash of October 1929 marked the beginning of a global economic crisis with disastrous consequences for farmers all over the world. Primary producers on all continents were hit by the collapsing demand and unparalleled fall in prices for agricultural goods.Footnote 137 In America as well as in Europe, the Great Depression led to vigorous state intervention, including legislative and social policy action to soften the economic and social hardship experienced by the farming population.Footnote 138 The economic downturn also resulted in governments favouring national protectionist policies that defended home agricultural markets and reversed earlier attempts at cooperation. By 1930, not only European governments but also the United States, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand had resorted to enhanced protectionist measures in the form of increased tariff barriers and customs duties.Footnote 139
Nevertheless, because the census was taken just before the crisis unfolded, the impact on the project seemed, at least initially, to be relatively mild. Despite a climate of nationalist retrenchment and mutual mistrust, as many as sixty-two countries participated in the counting and forty-six countries even managed to run a complete census: that is, they obtained records for each farm either by asking farmers to respond to the census form or by sending enumerators. Other countries – notably Argentina, India, and Japan – ran a more limited survey. Approximately one-third of participants were European states, and one-third were colonial territories in Asia and Africa. The final third was composed of countries in North, South, and Central America, as well as Oceania.Footnote 140 Two leading agricultural economies, the USSR and China, did not participate in the counting, however, despite having received the census director for preliminary discussions. Other countries, such as Brazil, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, had to drop the project ‘at the last moment’ owing to a lack of financial resources.Footnote 141
In spite of Estabrook’s best efforts, the census took on a different form for every participating country and the results varied accordingly. Where fresh data was obtained by making records for each farm, as was the case in a number of western European countries and the United States, results were generally detailed and precise. In some places, such as India, previously existing data was complemented by specific investigations.Footnote 142 In other instances, notably new states such as Czechoslovakia, or colonial territories such as Egypt or Mozambique, this was the first time that an agricultural census had ever been conducted.Footnote 143 In the latter two cases, as in other parts of Africa, the data provided was based on ‘approximate estimates’ by the colonial administrations.
There is no doubt that the census project extended the availability of agricultural statistics by unifying their scope and by inciting governments to coordinate their surveys temporally. Beyond the individual censuses, however, there was almost no synthesis and the project was in many ways abandoned before completion. Plans to interpret the data and to correlate the information on supply with other data on demand and consumption were dropped because of financial constraints and international tensions.Footnote 144 The data was not double-checked for accuracy, and there were no summaries of the patterns of agricultural production that could have been used for international discussions. Rather, as was the case with previous agricultural statistics published by the IIA and the USDA, each country’s results were presented separately. Owing to a lack of funds and because the Institute had to wait for the reports to be furnished, the publication of the results was considerably delayed and the statistics only appeared in 1938, making them outdated and virtually useless as a tool for economic forecasts.Footnote 145 This underscored the main weakness of the IIA, namely that it entirely depended on governments’ willingness to supply the data as it lacked its own reporting service.Footnote 146 Finally, a planned census for 1940 was cancelled because of concerns about the war.Footnote 147
Given this mitigated outcome, even international experts who had initially supported the census (such as Hobson) openly questioned whether what Hobson described as the IIA’s ‘exaggerated belief in the power of statistics’ was justified. A long-standing critic of the Institute’s inner workings, Hobson now doubted that the IIA was capable, as an international institution, of covering agricultural commodities ‘with sufficient accuracy and thoroughness and with the necessary speed’ to outshine the existing information services and government reports ‘of the principal producing countries’.Footnote 148 In fact, against the backdrop of the competitive environment of the 1930s and the huge increase in protectionism, it was surprising that the IIA managed to publish the data at all.
Tragically, Estabrook did not live to see the published results of his efforts, as the global economic downturn dramatically collided with a personal crisis. His return to Washington was a sobering experience. He had to face up to the estrangement from his wife, with whom communication had grown scarce during his travels.Footnote 149 Moreover, he found that Hobson had been recruited as an adviser to the newly organized Federal Farm Board, while the administration’s new focus on agricultural emergency policies meant that Estabrook’s expertise was no longer valued.Footnote 150 Now in his sixties, the former census director was plagued by professional uncertainty, resulting financial difficulties, and mysterious health issues that affected his eyesight and left him virtually blind and depressed.Footnote 151 Disappointed that he was ‘not wanted’ and that his ‘long experience and extensive travel and intimate knowledge of … agriculture went for naught’, Estabrook retired to his farm in Maryland, where he died in 1936.Footnote 152 Like other USDA experts, such as Fairchild, whose cosmopolitan approach to botanical exploration led him to travel the world in the 1920s, Estabrook’s rise and fall illustrates the changing fortunes of those individuals who sought to export American research against a backdrop of fluctuating national and international governmental and philanthropic policies.Footnote 153
From the mid 1930s onwards, agrarian internationalist endeavours moved in a new direction. In 1933, the International Education Board was ‘liquidated’ and the Rockefeller Foundation turned away from the census project.Footnote 154 In Geneva, the crisis inspired leading health, agricultural, and education experts at the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization to rethink the role played by agriculture not only for the world economy but also in regard to human health, hunger, and nutrition.Footnote 155 This would lead to a new integrated approach to food production that would have long-lasting repercussions on international rural development policies. The new approach placed nutrition at the heart of agricultural production, arguing that this shift would create a positive spiral in which better-fed people bought better food, thus raising prices for agricultural products.Footnote 156 It appears that a new qualitative focus on health, welfare, and diet and an increased emphasis on the social aspects of economic policies were replacing the primacy of quantitative measurements of agricultural production.
Conclusion
The history of the First World Agricultural Census illuminates the combined endeavours of American philanthropy and state expertise to map agricultural landscapes across the world. It highlights the role played by American institutions, state officials, and expert networks in developing transnational practices and policies of agricultural knowledge production. Though placed under the umbrella of an international organization and designed as universalist in its scientific and geographical scope, the census was shaped by American concerns about worldwide agricultural resources and their impact on international competition and the evolution of the world economy.
Even though the census’s usefulness for the formulation of agricultural economic policies in the interwar years was arguably minimal, it had long-term implications for international discussions on rural development. Thus, despite varying results and success, it worked as a homogenizing tool in which a wide variety of societies were defined by their agricultural outputs. The census was an attempt at bringing order into the supposedly heterogeneous, unorganized, and unchartered rural world. It was seen as a way to create a global picture of worldwide agricultural resources that could be used for a systematic review of the current and prospective state of nationally and regionally defined agricultural practices. Thus, the survey also contributed to what James C. Scott has called the ‘administrative ordering of nature and society’.Footnote 157
Indeed, the 1930 census set a crucial precedent for further global surveys. After the Second World War, the IIA was transformed into and rebranded as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an organization strongly shaped by American agricultural expertise and by the directorship, between 1949 and 1954, of the former USDA official and New Deal agricultural administrator Norris E. Dodd (1879–1968).Footnote 158 Following the model of the interwar census, from 1950 onwards the FAO’s World Programme for the Census of Agriculture asked states to carry out agricultural surveys every ten years. The second world agricultural census, which took place in 1950, shared all of the categories of the 1930s enquiry but it also departed from it in some aspects. Global measurements and comparability of data remained key elements of the enquiry, but the scope of the census was widened to include data on rural welfare. Thus, greater importance was put on securing information about the living standards of rural people by assessing the amount of food consumed by the producer and his family, by measuring to what extent the producer had access to animal and mechanical rather than human power, and by focusing on the nutritional aspects of certain livestock and poultry products.Footnote 159
Over the next decade, hunger, poverty, and population dynamics became the new buzzwords of international policy, and the seeming inefficiency of ‘traditional’ agricultural methods and systems of tenure in Asia and Africa moved to the centre of FAO technical assistance programmes. Based on experiences gained in the interwar years, the Rockefeller Foundation launched one of its most ambitious attempts at resolving the issue of agricultural ‘backwardness’ by transforming rural economies in Asia through a green revolution. Thus, from the 1960s onwards, a new wave of scientific planning swept over the rural world, but now with distinctly north–south parameters. Footnote 160 Statistical evidence to quantify and qualify local and global production would remain central to this American-led development regime.
Amalia Ribi Forclaz is Assistant Professor in International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Her current research project focuses on the history of agricultural development and knowledge production between 1920 and 1960. More generally, her research covers the international history of agricultural labour and development, the history of humanitarian organizations in the context of imperial expansion, and the global history of slavery and abolition. Her book Humanitarian imperialism: the politics of anti-slavery activism, 1880–1940 was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.
