3 - “Freedom from Want”: UNRRA’s Rinderpest Campaigns

Summary

Chapter 3 narrates how the rinderpest vaccines encouraged US, British, and Canadian officials to embrace the idea of global development and to create international machinery to pursue it. The chapter looks particularly at UNRRA anti-rinderpest efforts and argues that those efforts helped to transform Allied thinking from a focus on relief and rehabilitation to a focus on development. This is an important argument, because it makes the UNRRA a key part of the development narrative and emphasizes its pre-Cold War origins. Again, the technology itself—the vaccines—played a critical role. The technology made the action possible.