IN 1945, the Chairman of the First Session of the FAO Conference, Mr. Lester B. Pearson of Canada, stressed that FAO was the first functional international agency to set out with so bold an aim as that of helping nations to achieve freedom from want.
The Chairman of the Eighth Session of the Conference of FAO, Mr. K. J. Holyoake, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture, New Zealand, reviewed the progress made since then.
"FAO is only ten years old," he said. "It is a young Organization. I think it can be likened to a boy being forced to undertake a man's task before he is out of his teens... But I suggest... that FAO is setting an outstanding example of what can and must be done in other fields of international activity."
For the Organization's regular program of work the Conference passed a budget of $6.6 million for 1956 and $6.8 million for 1957. The funds likely to be available to FAO in 1956 from the United Nations Technical Assistance Fund will be in the region of $8 million. The Conference supported the Director-General's ideas for integrating the Technical Assistance Program more completely with the Regular Program.
The Conference agreed to a new category of Associate Membership of FAO for non-self-governing territories. Tunisia was admitted to full membership in FAO to become the seventy-second Member Government.
Initial arrangements were approved for a survey and appraisal of world agriculture, fishery and forestry resources in relation to needs, on a limited experimental basis. The Conference also agreed that the Organization should assume responsibility for the diffusion of information on the application of atomic energy in agriculture and related fields, and approved with some modifications the Director-General's proposal to introduce advanced Fellowship awards, with emphasis on research, under the regular program of the Organization.
With an eye to the world's rapid rate of population increase, the Conference decided that efforts to increase production and consumption must be heightened, even though some countries at the moment have large surpluses of certain agricultural products. The aim will be to increase efficiency in production - raising productivity per man, per hectare and per unit of cost. A decrease in costs and an increase in incomes are both elements of higher national living standards.
The Conference in Rome celebrates the Tenth Anniversary of the Founding of FAO
The actual day of the Tenth Anniversary, 16 October 1955, was commemorated by a special meeting on that date at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec, Canada, where FAO was formally founded in 1945.
Reviewing the work of FAO before the Conference at Rome, Dr. Cardon, the Director-General, emphasized his determination to achieve much closer integration an future between the activities financed from the regular budget and those financed from the international Technical Assistance Fund. Whilst a distinction must be maintained regarding the financial responsibilities of the Organization in connection with the expenditure of the money drawn from there respective sources, the work undertaken under each head is so closely interrelated that any attempt to maintain the conception of two separate program would be misleading. Statistical, economic and technical studies and publication prepared under the Regular Program provide the background against which FAO carries out its Technical Assistance projects. International agreements and consultations at meetings financed from the regular budget are, in many cases the basis upon which Technical Assistance is provided.
He Assistance attached great importance to FAO collaborating fully with it, sister agencies in matters of common interest, but on such a basis as to maintain its own independent responsibility for those fields of work which have been entrusted to its charge. There are many activities., which fall into the marginal area which exists between the broadly defined responsibilities of the different agencies. This is not altogether surprising seeing that all the different agencies are ultimately concerned with human beings in their various aspects, and that their problems of education, health, nutrition, and industrial activities are very closely connected. Agriculture cannot be prosperous if those engaged in it are diseased, illiterate or required to work under unsatisfactory conditions.
At a later stage, a majority of delegates expressed the hope that it would indeed prove possible to set up a special United Nations Fund for Economic Development or some similar institution, as was now under consideration by the General Assembly of the United Nations, and that FAO could be closely associated with its functioning.
