Food Policy 31 (2006) 272–274

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Obituary

Professor Sir Hans Singer. A Tribute

John Shaw 1

Formerly UN World Food Programme, Rome, Italy

The remarkable life and work of Professor Sir Hans Singer, who died on 26 February2006 at the age of 95, has already been described in obituaries in the broadsheet newspa-pers of the United Kingdom. The editors of Food Policy decided to publish this tribute,which focuses on those aspects of Hans Singer’s contributions that appeal most to thejournal’s readers.

Hans Singer will perhaps be best remembered for his pioneering and controversial workat the United Nations on the terms of trade between developed and developing countries.Studying long-term data series in 1948–49, he revealed that the net barter terms of tradebetween primary products and manufactures were subjected to a long-term downwardtrend. This contradicted the belief widely held by economists at the time that the long-termtrend favoured primary products. Singer argued that history had been unkind to develop-ing countries. Most of the secondary and cumulative effects of investment had beenremoved from the developing countries to the investing (industrialized) countries. Anddeveloping countries had also been diverted into types of activities that offered less scopefor technological progress, withholding a central factor of ‘dynamic radiation’ that hadrevolutionised society in the industrial world. Controversial, too, was Singer’s finding thatdeveloping countries were helping to maintain a rising standard of living in industrialisedcountries without receiving any equivalent compensation, which was potentially politicallyexplosive.

Apart from its statistical dexterity, which Singer had developed during his PhD studiesat Cambridge University under the supervision of Colin Clark, he emphasized that hiswork was meant to be more a policy guide than a long-term projection. He advised devel-oping countries to diversify out of primary exports through developing domestic marketsand industrialisation. Singer found a strong ally in Raul Prebisch, who used Singer’s ori-ginal work. This resulted in what became known as the Prebisch-Singer thesis, which

doi:10.1016/j.foodpol.2006.04.001

1 John Shaw knew and worked with Hans Singer for over 40 years and has written a biography entitled, Sir

Hans Singer. The Life and Work of a Development Economist, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2002 (hardback); New Delhi: BRPC (India), 2004 (paperback). He was formerly economic adviser and chief ofWFP’s Policy Affairs Service and consultant to the Commonwealth Secretariat, FAO and the World Bank.

E-mail address: djohnshawUK@aol.com.

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implies that without major changes in the structure of the world economy, the gains fromtrade will continue to be distributed unequally between developing and developed nations.The thesis created a growth industry in the development economics literature. Increasinglysophisticated statistical and econometric analyses have vindicated the thesis, making it oneof the very few hypotheses in economics that have stood the test of time.

Work on the terms of trade strengthened Singer’s resolve to champion the cause ofdeveloping countries. It also became the fulcrum for many of the other issues Singer tookup in order to achieve ‘distributive justice’ for developing countries. Among them, Singerplayed key roles in the establishment of a multilateral food aid facility and in the interna-tional debate on food aid. FAO and the UN had been advocating for some time the estab-lishment of a multilateral food aid agency. An opportunity came in 1960 when the UNGeneral Assembly passed a resolution on the ‘Provision of food surpluses to food-deficitpeoples through the United Nations system’, and invited the FAO director-general, in con-sultation with the UN secretary-general, to establish ‘without delay’ procedures by which,with the assistance of the UN system, ‘the largest practicable quantities of surplus foodmay be made available on mutually agreeable terms as a transitional measure against hun-ger’. FAO’s director-general, B.R. Sen, appointed a group of five ‘high-level, independentexperts’ to assist him in preparing his report. Hans Singer, who was Principal Officer in theOffice of the UN Under-Secretary for Economic and Social Affairs at the time, wasappointed and held a special position in the group. He was appointed chairman andenjoyed the confidence of the executive heads of both the UN and FAO. He had uniqueand profound experience gained in working on: the proposals for a Special UN Fund forEconomic Development (SUNFED), during which he had shown a special interest in amultilateral form of the US PL 480 food aid programme; the UN Special Fund for pre-investment activities; and the UN Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance.

The group’s report, entitled An Expanded Programme of Surplus Food Utilization, sub-mitted to the FAO director-general in February 1961, was well received. The US ambas-sador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, described it in a memorandum to President Kennedy as‘one of the most remarkable documents on the subject’. In a memorandum to the US Sec-retary for Agriculture, Orville Freeman, Willard Cochrane, director of the US Departmentof Agriculture’s Economics Service, described it as ‘an excellent report. The analysis of therole of food aid in economic development is in my opinion, highly competent and infor-mative. I know of no better analysis in the literature on economic development’. Thereport paved the way for the approval of UN World Food Programme (WFP) as athree-year experimental programme (1963–65). Subsequently, Singer remained a principaladviser to the UN secretary-general on WFP matters. He drafted the joint views of the UNsecretary-general and FAO director-general on the future of WFP at the end of the exper-imental period, which made the case for WFP’s continuation.

Of the many issues and concerns that Hans Singer addressed in a career that coveredseven decades, during which he produced 450 publications, one of his greatest contribu-tions was to the international debate on food aid. He wrote extensively on the subjectand left few aspects of it untouched. The assignments he did for WFP in 1975 and 1985(with Simon Maxwell and Edward Clay) provided what was described as the most com-plete guide and assessment of the literature on food aid for development. His book, withJohn Wood and Tony Jennings, Food Aid. The Challenge and the Opportunity (1987), isstill regarded as one of the best in the field. He was guest editor with me of a special issueof Food Policy in February 1988 on ‘Food Policy, Food Aid and Economic Adjustment’.

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His views on food aid as providing an opportunity, as well as a challenge, to achievingfood security for the neediest people in the poorest countries provided a balanced assess-ment and reasoned account when much of the criticism of food aid was based on polemicalargument and anecdotal evidence. He received the Alan Shawn Feinstein World HungerAward for Research and Education in 1994/95, WFP’s Food for Life Award in 2001,and a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Development Studies Association of the UKand Ireland in 2004. His publications and papers have been deposited in the library ofthe Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK.