This paper will discuss international efforts to coordinate agricultural migration from Europe to Latin America. These efforts began in the 1930s in the International Labor Organization (ILO) and then were picked up after 1945 by the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM, the predecessor of today’s International Organization for Migration). Both institutions explicitly presented “migration for settlement” as a program of social and environmental transformation. The goal was to send European farmers to establish commercially viable farms. This program was motivated by a complex conception of economic, social, and environmental sustainability – understood as predicable profits, as inter-generational family continuity, and as the cultivation of soil nutrients. These goals often proved difficult to combine in practice, and international policy priorities often conflicted with local policies and commercial realities.
The campaign to internationalize ‘migration for settlement’ is noteworthy because it absorbed considerable institutional resources and because it lasted for a remarkably long time, from the 1930s through the 1970s. Thus, it covered the transition from the late League of Nations – where there was a strong emphasis on rural development – to the early United Nations – where industry-driven models of modernization gained wide purchase. This paper will explore how the relative position accorded to agricultural migration changed in relation to other economic objectives as international organizations responded to the shift from a world economy organized around empires to a world economy organized around nation-states.