Friedrich T. Wahlen, Former Swiss Leader
Former President Friedrich Traugott Wahlen, who literally turned Switzerland into a giant farm in the food-short days of World War II, died Thursday.
He was 86 and died at his Bern home after a long, unspecified illness, family members said.
A graduate in agronomy who worked seven years in Canada before joining the Swiss Federal Administration, Wahlen was appointed commissioner for war food production in 1939. Under what became known as the Wahlen Plan, parks and gardens were used in all-out efforts to boost food production while Switzerland remained a neutral island surrounded by German troops.
After the war, he served for two years as deputy director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
He was successively in charge of the Switzerland Ministries of Justice, Economics, and Foreign Affairs and held the ceremonial post of president in 1961. After his retirement in 1965, Wahlen returned to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, working on a project to cultivate Egyptian land west of the Nile delta. He also was a member of the commission that drafted a new Swiss constitution.
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