The panel aim is to analyse the relationship between food sovereignty policies existing in European countries since the 1920s and the need, after the post-WWII, to quickly open up Europe to international trade food networks. During the 1920s European countries adopted protective strategies concerning the primary sector and in the 1930s the economic crisis increased their autarchic policies. In the post-WWII these countries needed food aids by UNRRA and ERP (in its first phase): then, some of them started to build a new European rural market.
The food sovereignty policies strengthened associations of producers that maintained their relevance in the midst of the post WWII food emergencies and collaborated to the European reconstruction.
The panel explores more different research lines, adopting a comparative and diachronic approach in order to investigate ruptures or continuities: it particularly wants to analyse food chains related to cereals, oilseeds, meat, sugar, dairy products, coffee, etc. Issues to focus on are: food chains reconstruction in the first and second post-war years; protective policies and changes about productions and trades concerning food “commodities” in the 1920s-1930s; the rhetoric of ‘national’ foods and the use of rural world as a reservoir of autarkic food resources; the effects of UNRRA and ERP aids effects and the progressive opening of European food markets until the Stresa Conference agreements (July 1958); the food trade relations between Western and Eastern Europe during the first phase of the Cold War.