by cities reduced to rubble, infrastructures gravely damaged, and millions of people without a home. The conflict had left behind collapsed economies and a profound scarcity of resources, together with the need for peace and for economic and social recovery in Europe.31 In that scenario, on the one hand there arose the need for recovery plans that could not only rebuild nations physically but also stabilise their economies;32 on the other hand, the right to food (or rather, the fight against hunger) found citizenship in specific regulatory fora and was, for the first time, formalised at the global level in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the General Assembly on 10 December 1948.33 With regard to the first aspect (recovery plans), the ambitious programme of economic aid for Europe – the “European Recovery Program” – proposed in 1947 by the United States Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, known as the Marshall Plan, must be recalled. 34 The Plan – implemented from 1948 to 1952 – provided for an investment of about 13 billion dollars in financial, material, and technical aid, and was intended to reconstruct European economies and stabilise the continent.35 The aid enabled European countries to import essential goods, repair damaged infrastructures, and stimulate industrial production, paving the way for the subsequent European integration.36 A fundamental element of the Marshall Plan was the attention devoted to agriculture,37 since the war had also devastated the countryside, with the destruction of crops and agricultural equipment, leaving many populations in total poverty. For these reasons, a significant part of the Plan’s funds was allocated to the agricultural sector, providing machinery, seeds, and fertilisers 31 P. De Castro, Piano Marshall e avvio delle politiche comunitarie, in Rivista di Storia dell’Agricoltura, No. 2, December 2024, p. 1 ff. See also P. De Castro, F. Adinolfi, F. Capitanio, S. Di Falco, A. Di Mambro, The politics of land and food scarcity, London, 2012. 32 J.B. De Long, B. Eichengreen, The Marshall Plan: History’s most successful structural adjustment program, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 3899, Cambridge, 1991. 33 L. Costato, Diritto al cibo, cit., p. 8. See also A. Gusmai, Diritto all’acqua vs diritto al cibo: un paradosso?, in L. Violini, B. Randazzo (eds), Il diritto all’acqua, cit., p. 148. 34 P. De Castro, Piano Marshall, cit., p. 1. On the Marshall Plan see, also, D.W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe. Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction 1945-55, New York, 1992; E. Bernardi, La riforma agraria in Italia e gli Stati Uniti: guerra fredda, Piano Marshall e interventi per il Mezzogiorno negli anni del centrismo degasperiano, Bologna, 2006; M. Campus, L’Italia, gli Stati Uniti e il piano Marshall: 1947-1951, Roma-Bari, 2008; F. Fauri, Il Piano Marshall e l’Italia, Bologna, 2010. 35 P. De Castro, Piano Marshall, cit., p. 2. 36 See P. De Castro, Piano Marshall, cit., p. 2. 37 E. Bernardi, La riforma agraria, cit., passim. 437 WATER GOVERNANCE AND RIGHT TO FOOD
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