![]() Access to the Allied market was also a means of pressure in negotiations with the neutrals the French, for example, having committed themselves to buy part of the production of Italian citrus fruits in exchange for its entry into the war alongside the Entente. ![]() The Netherlands and Switzerland gradually reduced their trade with Germany. Only neutral countries, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, or the United States (U.S.) until 1917, continued to supply both sides before the Allies put in place a concerted strategy to starve the Central Powers: firms suspected of trading with the enemy were blacklisted. The outbreak of war in 1914 immediately disrupted traditional supply channels, which were now aligned with military alliances. Winston Churchill (1874-1965), one of its architects and first lord of the admiralty, wrote after the conflict that the shared aim was to “to starve the whole population – men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound – into submission”. The powers that entered the war in 1914 therefore had very different food situations, with more or less marked dependence on exporting countries, some of which were now in the opposite camp.Įven before 1914, starving the enemy became an explicit strategic objective in the context of economic warfare. The Ottoman Empire was still facing regular food crises before 1914, and lacked road and rail infrastructure. Two thirds of Germany's imports were transported by ship, including grain from Russia, the world’s leading exporter of grain prior to 1914, where the transport network, designed for export, would prove unsuitable to deliver food to domestic markets during the war. The United Kingdom’s economy was already oriented toward the world. In the 1910s, food security in Western countries depended on a complex logistical system, combining maritime, rail, river and road transport, whose networks were very diversely developed. This interdependence was also evident at the local level in many countries, where city dwellers obtained their food from the nearby suburbs, from increasingly specialized agricultural regions, or from abroad. Others had great regional disparities, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Hungarian agrarian periphery supplied a large proportion of Austria's food. Some states, being self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs, had to resort to imports from time to time. In Belgium, dependence on foreign foodstuffs rose to 80 percent. In 1914, Germany imported about 30 percent of its food, including half of its meat, fertilizers and almost all of its vegetable fats. Nearly two-thirds of the British calories were imported from all over the world, while France and Germany produced most of their food, but bought some from abroad. Starvation as a Weapon ↑ Starving the Enemy ↑īy 1914, the economies of Western countries were already largely globalised to different degrees. Combining global approaches and local case studies would make it possible to move away from the national approaches that still dominate the field. But much remains to be done, for example concerning the rural world, food markets or the phenomena of food acculturation. Over the last ten years, studies on economic warfare, logistics, the feeding of soldiers and food aid have contributed a great deal to our knowledge of food and nutrition issues in different countries at war. However, the current state of research does not allow us to study the Central Powers as thoroughly as the Entente countries. This article examines the civil and military issues of food and nutrition within the Entente and the Central Powers during the Great War in the context of longer-term developments in global food issues, with a particular focus on the countries of Europe and North America. In 1918, the defeat of the Central Powers, strangled by the food shortages, was also rooted in their approach to wartime supplies and the failures of the policies put in place. Cutting off the enemy's food supplies was one of the objectives of economic warfare fought on a global scale. Food was an essential issue in this total war, as food production and distribution were areas where states intervened massively to provide the food essential to the survival of populations. On the home front, hundreds of millions of civilians, indispensable to the war effort, had to be fed despite shortages. In 1918, 75 million soldiers of the Entente and the Central Powers had to be fed daily, an unprecedented challenge for armies. The First World War not only overwhelmed societies, it also revolutionised the diet of European and North American countries. ![]()
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