This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors.

This study has concentrated on the work of the committees who picked up British farming from its depressed prewar state and revolutionised British farming after 1939. The way in which the government achieved this, and the resulting impact on farming landscapes and rural populations were not however necessarily replicated elsewhere. The years 1939–45 were ones of global conflict and anxieties about food security, and there were many parts of the world where emergency powers were enacted to ensure some continuity of food supplies. Across Europe, for example, Allied, neutral and Axis governments implemented their own food programmes, sometimes as an essential feature of their defence, sometimes under occupation, and sometimes as some kind of guarantee against disruptions in international trade.

The significance of food security and its disruption as an overt weapon in the Second World War has been highlighted by Collingham. There were many instances across Europe of hunger and even famine, as in Nazi-occupied Greece, or the western Netherlands in the Hongerwinter of 1944–45, when 18,000 people died of hunger. Millions more died around the world, as in the hideous Bengal famine in 1943. Even in neutral Sweden, a delegated administrative structure for food supply was established, together with rationing. It has been estimated that at least 20 million people globally died from starvation, malnutrition and associated diseases in the war, although the data is notoriously difficult to confirm. Something like one million people died from starvation in the siege of Leningrad alone, part of systematic Nazi attempts to eradicate opposition in their eastward expansion, which also incorporated the elimination of ‘useless eaters’.

In the United States, agricultural efforts were redoubled from 1941 as Agricultural Adjustment Administration officials, representing the federal government, visited farms to ascertain by how much they could increase production. They encountered familiar stories of labour and machinery shortages. Wartime California, for example, struggled to implement the importation of Mexican labour to work in its highly intensive farming industry.