ABSTRACT
As busy as the previous inter-war years were for nutritional advancement so the World War II saw governance and multilateral cooperation on an as yet unprecedented scale. Commenting on free trade and the notion of comparative advantage, a staple of international economics at the time, Karl Brandt noted in the 1939 compilation ‘War in Our Time’ that nation’s seemingly increasing over-reliance on foreign resources was borne out of political expediency rather than necessity (Brandt 1939). Indeed, in arguing against the over-simplistic and oft-parried phrase ‘the have’s and have-nots’ in the economic sense, Brandt suggested that it was in fact this over-reliance and the neglect of a country’s own resource base that was more likely at the heart of the widening economic gaps rather than any desire to get rich off the back of other countries. In rectifying this situation Brandt offered that in fact nations were historically generally very adaptable when it came to food and raw materials and instead of following an economic course that relied too heavily on imports, a rethink might be what was needed. Despite sentiments seemingly to the contrary too, Brandt was not against free trade as such not by a long shot instead he proposed that in times of supposed free trade when protectionist barriers or quotas rendered the playing field uneven, then a perhaps a fundamental shift of focus towards domestic reliance might be one answer. In this insightful look at resource allocation within countries in general, he touched on many of the natural resource issues that were to become prevalent in the 1990s. Although his focus was economics, trade and foodstuffs in particular, he did advocate thrift in consumption and sustainability in the sympathetic use of local natural resources. Furthermore, in his writings, there is more than a hint of the modern day food sovereignty movement in his advocacy of policy self-determination and food self-reliance (Brandt 1939).
