AT QUEBEC CITY, in October 1945, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations was formally created. In October 1970 that event was relived at a short ceremony in Canada.
Those who have been connected with FAO through the intervening years have seen many changes in the Organization's programmes and structure, and many, often disquieting, changes in the world scene.
One such change, the progressive deterioration in man's environment, was featured earlier that same month of October 1970 in the Canadian House of Commons when Prime Minister Trudeau announced that his Government was taking steps toward the establishment of a department of the environment. The minister in charge would have to take a broad ecological perspective in the discharge of his responsibilities and in particular would take the lead in the enhancement of the quality of the environment. Having at its core the present department of fisheries and forestry, the new unit would absorb elements of various existing ministries, including the Canadian Wildlife Service, so as to bring within one department all the principal governmental activities relating to the development of water resources, the protection of the water habitat of marine life, and the fight against pollution.
"But the fight against the pollution of our environment is far beyond the capacity of one minister and his department," said Mr. Trudeau." Indeed, it cannot be waged effectively by the federal government alone or by the provinces individually, or even just by Canada. It is a fight that must be waged by all ministers, all governments and all people."
In the United Kingdom, too, the Government has set up for the first time a department for the environment, albeit of different complexion to Canada's. The new British Minister for the Environment was one of the speakers to address the Second International Congress of the World Wildlife Fund which was held in London in November.
The theme of this congress was "All Life on Earth," and its president, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, maintained that measures for the conservation of wildlife must in future embrace much more comprehensive provision for conservation of the environment as a whole. The hard, cold, inescapable fact is that we are destroying " the surrounding circumstances " which we require in order to survive at a rate which, in spite of all that has been written and said, few people have yet begun to recognize.
The congress chairman, Peter Scott, said, " The great powers must recognize that nuclear war is neither the only threat nor the most imminent to our survival. It is the increasingly rapid eating up of the natural environment. Certainly there is to be a United Nations conference on man and his environment in 1972, but we have not two years to lose. They should start talking now, at the summit or very near it."
It is clear that FAO cannot hope successfully to combat hunger, poverty and squalor while human destruction of the biosphere goes on all around. This was stressed by Director-General Addeke H. Boerma at the general commemorative conference of all the 121 Member Nations held in Rome on 16 November 1970 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of FAO. It seemed to him, moreover, that there was a certain malaise now surrounding international organizations, a fading of the vision, a loss of power to inspire action. " There is a feeling," he said, " that things are getting out of control, as evidenced by the pollution of the environment."
The guest of honour at the conference, Pope Paul VI, went further. He said, " The progressive deterioration of that which has generally come to be called the environment risks provoking a veritable ecological catastrophe.
We see the pollution of the air we breathe, the we drink. We see the pollution of rivers, lakes - even oceans - to the point of inspiring fear of a real biological death if action is not taken in the near future to prevent it from happening."
If all this alarm is even partly justified, there can be no doubt about what one of FAO's chief concerns over the years ahead must be; and there is no doubt that FAO's Forestry Department, by its very mandate, must be in the forefront of the struggle. That it will receive the necessary support is witnessed by this telegram. received from tile United States Forest Service: " We pledge continued support for FAO's promotion of forestry as an instrument of social and economic development stop We hope that forestry initiative fostered throughout; the world by FAO during the past twenty-five years will survive and grow and contribute to betterment of mankind everywhere during the next twenty-five."
