by Gunnar Myrdal
Egon Glesinger's contribution to international forestry and FAO
GUNNAR MYRDAL, distinguished Swedish economist and political scientist, is the author of numerous social studies among them Asian drama and The challenge of world poverty.
Egon was a lifelong intimate friend and in some periods also a close collaborator.
We first met when, for the academic year 1930-31, I served as assistant professor at the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva. Egon was then completing his voluminous and valuable doctoral thesis on the European forestry industry, le bois en Europe. He participated in a seminar I led on the Great Depression, which had then spread to Europe and was worsening. I retain memories of his brilliant analytical conception of what was happening
In 1931, our personal relations had become so close that Egon, finished with his doctoral studies, decided to come to Sweden, where he rapidly developed effective relations with the leading personalities in the forestry and pulp and paper industries. In Sweden he also found his life companion, Ruth.
Egon was born into a very rich Jewish family with immense holdings of forests and related wood industries in Teschen, a region on both sides of the boundary between Poland and Czechoslovakia. He told me that he was pressed to come home and prepare himself to head the forestry empire of his family. Egon, however, wanted instead to devote himself to serving the more general and international interest of organizing producers and consumers of timber products in all Europe. Though we never discussed it in detail, I gathered that this decision caused something of a break with his family and particularly with his father.
Bringing together the interested parties he succeeded in forming the Comité International du Bois in the 1930s. I recall that be reckoned it as a major accomplishment to have brought the Russians into cooperation within the new organization, instead of their becoming, as was feared at that time, disrupting outsiders. Their incorporation into the new organization was a major factor in the maintaining of the relative stability of trade and prices in Europe in the field of forestry and wood products in the period between the two world wars.
After the outbreak of World War II, Egon moved the headquarters from Vienna to Brussels and then to Geneva, but could not, of course, prevent its collapse. Egon and Ruth then finally came to the United States.
This was the time when the preparations were going on for the creation of the worldwide organization that was to become FAO. Egon was working toward having forestry and wood industries included as a major field of activity of FAO. This met with much resistance from many quarters and was rejected by the formative FAO conference at Hot Springs, Virginia, in April 1943. After this meeting, an interim commission was established to create FAO's operating procedures. Lester B. Pearson, later Prime Minister of Canada, was the chairman of this commission. Egon gradually succeeded in getting Pearson, Frank L. McDougall, the influential Australian member of the commission, and others to reverse the Hot Springs decision and include forestry in the FAO. He called on Clarence Forsling, of the US Forest Service and together they formed an informal group of international foresters and forestry-minded persons, including Lyle Watts, Chief of the US Forest Service, to support forestry in the FAO. The US representative on the Commission, Under Secretary of Agriculture Paul H. Appleby, hesitated to go against the Hot Springs decision. He was prevailed upon to consult with Dean Acheson, then US Assistant Secretary of State, who replied "by all means, forestry should be included" and finally with President Franklin Roosevelt, who personally approved it, sending back Appleby's letter with a note scrawled on it:
"Yes - I think forestry should be included. FDR" The result was that FAO got a Forestry and Forest Products Division. Its first Director was Marcel Leloup and Egon was his deputy. Later Egon succeeded Leloup as Director. His entire working life made him eminently qualified for his contributions to international forestry and FAO.
Egon was a dynamic person and when I became Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) in 1947 it was natural that I should turn to my old friend for advice and collaboration.
According to ECE's terms of reference, both agriculture and the forestry industries were, of course, under its responsibility, as well as that of FAO. Instead of following the unfortunate pattern of interagency rivalry and jealousy, which have become so prevalent among intergovernmental organizations, Egon and I made up our minds that the ECE and FAO should work together. And we got the unreserved support of John Boyd Orr, the first Director General of FAO, and also that of Lord Bruce of Melbourne who was at that time an effective Chairman of FAO's Council.
Together we developed an organizational scheme, according to which the regional economic commissions - of which ECE was the first one - should serve as FAO's regional agency in Europe; ECE should establish committees for work on the problems in Europe, which would be serviced by FAO officials. Thus ECE had a Timber Committee and later an Agricultural Committee, both with subcommittees and working parties to the extent needed for their practical work, and they were subordinate to both organizations.
For FAO this had the special advantage that it got its work in Europe integrated into ECE's general work on the economy of Europe. Another advantage was that as the Soviet Union was a member of ECE and gradually came to cooperate more actively in its committees, FAO could extend its work to include also Russia, though the Soviet Union refrained from joining the FAO. For ECE this cooperation implied that we had all the expert knowledge that could be mobilized in FAO at our disposal when working on European economic problems.
As Executive Secretary of ECE, I, of course, came to rely on my old friend Egon much more generally. Besides his responsibilities in FAO he became an effective member of my group of directors and, indeed, of my Central Office, whenever he came to Geneva.
Throughout his life Egon focused on the great international problems that he began to deal with as a youth in Geneva. He was often controversial, and sometimes disliked but always respected. He counted among his personal friends many leading international figures, including three heads of the United Nations: Trigve Lie, Dag Hammarskjöld and Kurt Waldheim. He remained active in international development work almost to the end, and one of the last letters he received was from Secretary General Waldheim and concerning his work as a consultant to help found an Indonesian pulp mill with the cooperation of the UNDP.
At one time when he was just leaving his duties with FAO, we made a plant that we two, working together, would write a book on the deterioration of the various intergovernmental organizations within the UN family, which we had anxiously been watching from inside and from outside. That plan we were not able to fulfill, although I still have preserved outlines and sketches of manuscripts by Egon and myself.
To me personally the death of Egon Glesinger is a tremendous loss. Let me point out some general traits in Egon's character - which, in the main, he retained over the years and decades.
He was born as a favored son in a very wealthy family and was accustomed to a grandiose life style. But he never cared much about money, although obviously having enough of it, and was always generous, not to say lavish, in his relationships with his friends. I have already mentioned that when he was urged to come home to be prepared to head a great private economic empire, he preferred to serve the common public interest.
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Egon Glesinger, who was instrumental in bringing forestry into the FAO and was the founder of the Comité International du Bois, died in Rome on June 27, 1979 at the age of 72. Dr. Glesinger was Assistant Director General in charge of the Department of Public Relations and Legal Affairs when he retired from FAO in 1969. Before that he was Director of the Forestry and Forest Products Division, and he returned to forestry activities as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme after leaving FAO. He was born in Cesky-Tesin, now on the Czechoslovak side of the border with Poland, but then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After earning a degree in law from the University of Prague and a diploma in commercial science, Glesinger's impressive thesis for his doctorate in political science from the University of Geneva brought him to the attention of international agricultural economists. He formed the Comité International du Bois (CIB), which was made up of European wood exporters and which worked at getting quota agreements in a very competitive market and promoting wood products to increase export and domestic sales. The CIB pioneered in the collection of forest products trade statistics. With the coming of World War II it collapsed and Dr. Glesinger and his wife Ruth went to the United States. There he joined the National Lumber Company and then the staff of Fortune magazine. As consultant to the State of North Carolina he drafted a post-war programme for its forest industries. He also wrote two books during this period, Nazis in the woodpile, published in 1942, which aimed at showing the importance Germany gave to wood as an essential war material, and The coming age of wood, which came out in 1947 and hailed the many uses and the economic importance of wood for the post-war world. |
In the revolutions following World War II, the family fortune was lost, but I never heard him take this very seriously. When he changed his citizenship from Czechoslovakian to Austrian, this was not a radical break but rather a conservative move, as his and his whole family background was the old Austro-Hungarian empire with its conglomerate of peoples and cultures. He always felt himself very much at home in what was left of it in Austria, for which he showed a real patriotism.
Egon was born an optimist and remained an optimist throughout his life. When a project of his met with failure, he immediately had a new scheme for reaching the goal he was pursuing.
Sometimes I felt that he was unrealistically over-optimistic. When Hitler took power in Germany, Egon happened to be in Stockholm. I remember he believed that the Nazi craziness would rapidly meet defeat, while I was filled by forebodings of horrible things to come.
But this over-optimism was not to any degree an opportunistic adjustment. I remember from these days that Egon, who was the opposite of a religious conformist, took with him his hat and went to the synagogue, probably for the first time in decades. This was his protest, his way of expressing his hatred of nazism, even if he minimized in his own opinion what it would come to imply for the Jews in Germany, for Germany itself and for the world.
Though his mind was always full of schemes he was never a cheap intriguer of the type that flourishes among the frustrated secretariats of intergovernmental organizations. I never found him deceitful or betraying a righteous cause he was pursuing.
He was always deeply honest in his strivings, which never were directed toward his own personal advantage but always toward a general purpose. In that sense he remained intellectually and emotionally an aristocrat, who could afford to be unselfish.
among the FAO technical papers...
a continuously expanding list of studies dealing with specific problems of forestry. Many of these papers are available in all three languages - English, French and Spanish. All are available, on payment of handling charges, from the Distribution and Sales Section, FAO, Via delle Terme di Caracalla, 00100, Rome; or through the authorized sales agents and booksellers listed on the inside back cover.
FAO FORESTRY PAPERS
