From Noblesse Oblige to Defending Plenty: the Reconstruction of American Food Security Policy

The USA’s modern food security policy can be traced to 1943 when President Roosevelt initiated the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture in Hot Springs, Virginia. The instructions to the American delegation were

to secure from the Conference a vigorous call to the nations of the world to recognize and accept new responsibility for the elimination, so far as possible, of such deficiencies, particularly in food, among their peoples   

Meetings at Tehran in November 1943 then saw the leaders of the three wartime Allied Powers first discuss postwar reconstruction of international order together. There was broad recognition of the need for an ‘executive committee’ of states, though Churchill and Stalin advocated ‘spheres of influence’ models of postwar reconstruction, whereas Roosevelt’s concept involved organisations of worldwide reach and separated not by geography, but by level of influence over questions of international cooperation. 

Populations all around the world would be directly represented by their states in a general body, which could pass resolutions and make recommendations to an executive committee of states that would “deal with all non-military questions such as agriculture, food, health, and economic questions.” 

Resultant from these approaches, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was constituted in 1946. As the world’s wealthiest state, the USA contributed the most in assessed contributions (akin to obligatory membership dues), but showed great voluntary largesse, too. After US efforts to alleviate hunger through direct international food aid led to the institution of the World Food Programme (WFP) in 1961, the USA then became one of the WFP’s largest regular donors – often donating agricultural products directly. 

After the cold war, US focus on food security was turbocharged first by the Millennium Goals, established at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and then the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from 2012. The USA – the world’s ‘indispensable nation’ – alone provided between one-third and two-thirds of the WFP’s entire contributions every single year between 1991 and 2018. And to great effect: the work of the WFP was recognised for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.  

Today, however, the signals coming out of US government are that these ideas no longer have the same currency as before. The US delivered a statement to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in April 2025, asserting that “the United States expects FAO and the UN system to get “back to basics”” as “now is not the time for international organisations to request increased budgets.” 

Back to basics is shorthand for narrowing its remit and limiting the scope of its operations. This was consistent, after all, with the USA’s objection in March 2025 to an “international day of peaceful coexistence,” which it used to grandstand its opposition to the SDGs: they are a sinister form of soft power, incompatible with state sovereignty and designed to erode US power and prosperity – an endeavour in which their proponents might even be conspiring with the Chinese government – according to the Trump administration. 

The USA owes, as of the end of August 2025, $134.6 million in unmade payments to the FAO, from both 2025 and 2024 contributions. Indeed, while we wait to see if the US will make good on these obligations for now, in the administration’s proposed 2026 financial year budget it appears (pp.87-89) that the US is not going to provide any money to meet its obligations to the FAO. With the administration recognising “membership entails the payment of assessed contributions,” this appears as a signal of the USA’s imminent departure from the FAO.    

So what will take the place of the political focus this once occupied? In July 2025, the US Department of Agriculture published the National Farm Security Action Plan. The keynote is that “defending access to American abundance and preserving the American experiment is the essence of agriculture security.” The plan forms part of the ‘Make Agriculture Great Again’ initiative and contained within it is a significant focus on removing Chinese agents like farm owners – and the threats of agroterrorism that they are seen to represent – from US food supply chains. 

The plan also reimagines the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to “fully integrate agriculture into the broader national security enterprise over the coming months and years.” It places responsibility on the USDA, in collaboration with other parts of government, for things from “wartime scenario planning exercises related to agriculture,” to deploying its resources in attempts to protect “companies, regardless of size” against “cybersecurity and ransomware attacks.” It places added scrutiny on the USDA to vet its agricultural projects to ensure they “promote military readiness, protect US plants and animals, and enhance agricultural security.” 

To achieve this transformation, the plan holds that “USDA will support the development of a 21st century agro-defense workforce”. But currently the USDA has staff levels diminished by around 18,000 from the start of this administration, with the remaining staff embroiled in a dispute about organisational restructuring and relocating. Karen Stillerman, deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote to Deputy Secretary for Agriculture, Stephen Vaden, that these policies were driving an exodus from the department of skilled scientists doing essential work. 

What this suggests is that, in echoes of the much-touted deliberate destitution of departments more broadly, the new approach to food security in the USA entails not a mere reorientation, but the full-scale destruction and reconstruction of food security policies; from international noblesse oblige to a jealous defence of American plenty from outsiders.

Image: Flickr/Trump White House (D. Myles Cullen)

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