Developing Nutritional Standards and Food Policy: Latin American Reformers between the ILO, the League of Nations Health Organization, and the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau (original) (raw)
This chapter forms part of a larger research project at the University of St Gallen: ‘Recipes for modernity: The politics of food, development, and cultural heritage in the Americas’, which is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Notes
- For a comprehensive overview of the history of Latin American labour organizations, see R. J. Alexander and E. Parker, International Labor Organizations and Organized Labor in Latin America and the Caribbean. A History (Santa Barbara: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2011). For Alexander and Parker, the ILO is a very minor actor in Latin America.
Google Scholar - M. Rivas Vicuña, Convenciones internacionales sobre el Trabajo. Artículos publicados en el Mercurio (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1923), pp. 9, 51, 56.
Google Scholar - F. Walker Linares, La Sociedad de las Naciones y sus organismus del trabajo. Conferencias de divulgación científica (Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Chile, 1930). Walker Linares was irked, for instance, by the Chilean Congress’s failure to ratify ILO conventions before Albert Thomas’s 1925 visit, even though the national legislation was fully compatible earlier.
Google Scholar - J. P. Ramos, ‘Latin America and the International Labour Conference’, International Labour Review (vol. 25, no. 6, 1932), p. 739. Walker Linares and Rivas Vicuña also concurred on this point.
Google Scholar - He complained to the postal service, however, that important material arrived so late in Chile that timely replies were impossible. See J. C. Yáñez Andrade, ‘Chile y la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (1919–1925). Hacia una legislación social universal’, Revista de estudios histórico-jurídicos (vol. 22, 2000), pp. 317–332.
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Article Google Scholar - The LNHO received substantial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and was keen to work with non-European public health circles. The LNHO attempted to establish internationally comparable health statistics and funded research on leprosy, syphilis, malaria and child mortality; P. Weindling, ‘The League of Nations Health Organization and the Rise of Latin American Participation’, História, Ciências, Saúde — Manguinhos (vol. 13, no. 3, 2006), pp. 1–14; E. Scarzanella, ‘Los pibes en el palacio de Ginebra: las investigaciones de la Sociedad de las Naciones sobre la infancia latinoamericana (1925–1939)’, Estudios interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe (vol. 14, no. 2, 2003), at: www1.tau.ac.il/eial/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=508&Itemid=216 [accessed 12 October 2008].
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Google Scholar - Among other things, the mission found that working-class Chileans spent up to 80 per cent of their earnings on food, and that some people subsisted on barely 900 calories a day; C. Dragoni and E. Burnet, Report on Popular Nutrition in Chile (Geneva: League of Nations, 1937).
Google Scholar - Jorge Mardones-Restat, a disciple of Cruz-Coke’s, was at the helm of the Council; C. Huneeus and M. P. Lanas, ‘Ciencia política e historia: Eduardo Cruz-Coke y el estado de bienestar en Chile, 1937–1938’, Historia (Santiago) (vol. 35, 2002), pp. 151–186.
Google Scholar - The Peruvian delegate brought in a 50-page, illustrated booklet, Los restaurantes populares del Perú: Contribución al estudio del problema de la alimentación popular (Santiago, 1936). For the political context and the functioning of the restaurants see P. Drinot, ‘Food, Race and Working-class Identity: Restaurantes populares and Populism in 1930s Peru’, Americas (vol. 62, no. 2, 2005), pp. 245–270.
Article Google Scholar - International Labour Conference, Record of Proceedings, Twentieth Session, Geneva 1936 (Geneva, 1936), pp. 390–392, 481–487, 556–564.
Google Scholar - Tenth Pan American Sanitary Conference, ‘Recommendations and Conclusions of the Committee on Nutrition’ (Washington, DC: Pan American Sanitary Bureau, 1938).
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