On October 16, 1945, delegates from 42 countries signed the constitution of the Food and Agriculture Organization at a conference in Quebec City in Canada, and the agency began its work as the first of the new United Nations bodies. The United Nations charter entered into force eight days later. The meeting had opened on October 16 and ran into November. It was a long meeting. The organisation was given a broad mandate over food and farming.
The idea had been discussed during the war. An earlier conference at Hot Springs in Virginia in 1943 had set out the case for an international body to deal with food and agriculture once the fighting stopped, and the United Nations took up the plan after 1945. Rome had a role already. The FAO absorbed the work of an older institute in Rome that had studied agriculture since 1905.
The mandate covered nutrition, food security, forestry and fisheries, and the collection of statistics on crops and harvests. The work was wide. The new agency was to help member states raise output, improve diets, and share technical knowledge, and it was also meant to keep watch on the food supply so that shortages could be seen early. Its first director general was the British nutritionist John Boyd Orr, who had campaigned on hunger during the war and who won the Nobel peace prize in 1949.
The headquarters were placed in Rome in 1951 and still stand there, and the agency later became a specialised agency of the United Nations with a large field staff. In 1981 the conference at which it was founded was marked by a new observance, World Food Day, kept each year on October 16. The timing points to the founding meeting. Its reports on hunger are used by governments and relief agencies.