ARI Working Paper Series

Beriberi was widely viewed in the early twentieth century as one of the principal threats to public health in South, Southeast and East Asia. As its connection with the consumption of milled (“white”) rice became scientifically established, international attention turned to how this “tropical disease” might be eradicated: the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, founded in 1908 by the Americans in the Philippines and partly sustained in the interwar years by the Rockefeller Foundation, was in the forefront of the search for practical measures to eliminate beriberi. But proposals for international measures against the rice trade and the consumption of milled rice failed to garner support and regional governments opted for a more localized and less conflictual strategy, including nutritional education, health propaganda and the use of food supplements. The history of “the beriberi problem” thus illustrates the inherent limitations of tropical governance and why a pioneer international health organization apparently failed to meet one of its principal challenges.