1977 Newspaper Column                   FAO Money
       
                  This column appeared in a stack of literature from an FAO collector, ca. 1979.


FAO Coins

by JAMES MACKAY  - London Financial Times 11/26/1977, pg. 2

  OF ALL the agencies of the United Nations, the one most likely to become immortalised as much by its collectables as by its good works is the Food and Agricultural Organisation. In common with the other agencies, the FAO has had stamps issued in its honour by many member countries. The most notable issue was the omnibus project of 1963 with the theme of Freedom From Hunger when 51 Commonwealth countries, including Britain; and many foreign countries issued stamps. About £150,000 was raised from philatelic sales, enabling fthe FAO to organise a series of six regional and national farm broadcasting seminars in the developing countries.


   This modest beginning inspired the FAO to explore other collectable fields and resulted five years laterin the launching of the "Food for All". coin programme. In 1968 therewere 10 participating countries, nine of whom produced a single, relatively highdenomination coin highlighting some aspect of food production relative to their area

    In 1969 a further eight countries issued a single coin apiece and though the face value remained relatively high it was significant that the Dominican Republic produced a one centavo coin for the purpose:

   Since then the emphasis has been on Low denomination coins in base metal as part of the general circulating series of the country concerned. The FAO coin programme has grown steadily over the intervening years. By 1973 no fewer than 57 countries had issued 84 coins. By ,the end of this year over 80 countries will have produced about 220 different coins.

    Participating countries have made about £8m seignorage profit froth their coin issues and the FAO itself has made over $1m net income under the "Food for All" money programme. It is unique among international agencies in that this project is entirely self-financing and after payment of the running costs of the FAO Money Office in Rome the profits have been ploughed back into various agricultural projects and are currently financing such varied schemes as courses for women marketing leaders in West Africa, group feeding trainees in South East Asia and rural women's cooperatives in Mexico.
Unlike stamps, coins enjoy a lengthy period of circulation over many years and the propaganda or didactic element in their design gets across to a very much larger section of the population. In the Third World there will be millions of people who never see a postage stamp, but low denomination coins are an indispensable part of daily life in even the most backward community nowadays. This means that every single day many millions of people, precisely in those areas where sufficient food for all is still a target to be reached, are reminded that freedom from hunger and want for all is a daily concern for the whole world, and that the message of these same coins is being read in the developed countries by numismatists and others .

     Within the FAO context the subject matter of these coins is surprisingly varied. There are coins from Bhutan and Burma, Pakistantand Vietnam featuring rice cultivation, and others from India and Iran, Syria and the Sudan showing wheat and barley Maize, sorghum and millet grace the coins from Burundi, Mali and Zambia. A wide range of fruit and vegetables is to be found from the humble cabbage on the Seychelles 5c to the olives of Jordan and the dates of the United Arab Emirates.

     The major commodities, whose recent fluctuations have affected us all, are also highlighted in coins from Rwanda, Trinidad and the West African monetary union, featuring coffee, cocoa and cotton Vegetable oils are represented by coins from Brazil, the Gambia and Morocco featuring soya, groundnuts and sunflowers respectively. Water resources are the subject of coins from Egypt and Syria, depicting the Aswan and Euphrates Dams, while soil conservation is the message purveyed by Bangladesh and Thailand. More recent coins have tended to widen the scope to cover savings (Nepal, and Indonesia) and agrarian reform (Algeria and Panama) Family planning is the theme of the FAO  coins of Indonesia and Turkey; while  International Women's Year (1975) witnessed a crop of FAO coins devoted to the emancipation and development of women.

         One of the few European countries to take part in the programme is the Isle of Man whose halfpenny features a herring, mainstay of the Manx kipper industry; which has been threatened in recent years by over fishing of the Irish Sea. Earlier this year measures were taken to protect and conserve fish stocks in this area, so it is appropriate that the 1977 version of the halfpenny be issued with the additional legend  "F.A.O. FOOD FOR ALL."