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Translated from the original French by Rachel Kantrowitz
The idea that Africa is poor — now commonplace — is nevertheless relatively recent. It emerged, in fact, from international organizations in the aftermath of the Second World War, within the context of the standardization of knowledge about living conditions across the globe. It was presented as fact to a broader public a few decades later in the 1970s, when several African countries were struck by famine.1 Images of undernourished people, as well as statistics produced on hunger and malnutrition, played an important role in Africa's increasing association with poverty. The employment of numbers in this way thus first emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1952, in its first report on ‘the social situation across the world’, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (UNESCO) assessed ‘the energy content of the [nutritional] ration’ in the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika, and French West Africa to be 1,930, 1,980, and 2,070 calories per capita per day, respectively. This marked the first time that an international report invoked statistics of this type to demonstrate the fact that living standards were quite low on the African continent.2 From this point forward, such declarations became commonplace. Indeed, every subsequent year, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released new statistics on the world food situation which, up to the present, has helped to reinforce the idea of Africa as the poorest continent in the world.3
However, food and nutritional statistics had been produced in Africa since the beginning of the twentieth century. As Michael Worboys has demonstrated, it was after the First World War that the first research was undertaken on nutritional conditions in African colonies. This, not coincidentally, occurred at the same time that nutritional science became a burgeoning field and when the colonial projects of mise en valeur required a healthy and large workforce.4 Several surveys, beginning in the 1920s, found evidence of food shortages in both the French and British empires. Alongside this knowledge that one could describe as intentional (because it was driven by the desire to know the nutritional status of populations, albeit with an eye towards their labor productivity), empirical knowledge was also created unintentionally,...