Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

The Inter-American Cooperative Health Service, the Instituto Nacional de Nutrición and the "technocratization" of the nutrition problem in Colombia, 1940-1960

Mon, May 27, 10:45am to 12:15pm, TBA

Abstract

After the 10th Pan American Sanitary Conference, held in Bogotá in 1938, hygienist Jorge Bejarano stressed the urgency of creating a "National Food Council that directs the orientation and solution of this national problem". Several local physicians and politicians perceived that this problem had social, economic and biological aspects that should be addressed in a comprehensive manner. A national food policy should articulate several government institutions; implement social reforms such as the redistribution of land ownership, and the regulation of labor wages and food prices; and support various food hygiene measures, such as a broad nutrition education campaign, food assistance institutions, nutritional surveys and chemical analysis of local foods. This National Food Council was created in 1940; and later, with the financial and technical support of the Inter-American Cooperative Health Service, a nutrition laboratory and the National Institute of Nutrition (INN) were created (in 1943 and 1947). The "fight" against goiter (by adding iodine to salt), was one of the main programs carried out by the INN. In this paper, I want to analyze how the creation and activities of the INN (during the 1950s) reflected the local and international interactions, negotiations and tensions to define and address the "nutrition problem". I will argue that this case study sheds light on the global processes of "technocratization" and "depoliticization" of the so-called "national problems" or "social questions" that occurred in many Latin American countries during the early stages of the Cold War and the discourses of development.

Author