Maurice J. Williams, an international development specialist who retired in 1986 as executive director of the United Nations World Food Council in Rome, died May 10 at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 89 and had complications from a fall. Williams spent eight years overseeing the now-defunct World Food Council, a food policy arm of the United Nations that sought to end world hunger and draw attention to famine. He served several years with the CIA before joining the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1958. He helped administer aid programs in the Near East and South Asia and was named deputy director of USAID in 1970. During the next several years, he was a presidential coordinator for major foreign disaster relief efforts from Bangladesh to Nicaragua and served as chief U.S. negotiator on post-Vietnam War aid talks with North Vietnam. From 1974 to 1978, he was chairman of the development assistance committee of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international research group. Maurice Jacoutot Williams was born in Moncton, New Brunswick. He became a U.S. citizen as a young man. He attended Northwestern University in Illinois before serving in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. He received a master's degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1949. His honors included the USAID Distinguished Honor Award and the Rockefeller Public Service Award. In retirement, he ran a part-time consulting business in overseas development. He divided his retirement years between homes in the D.C. area and St. Petersburg, Fla., and then made Florida his full-time residence in 2006. His memberships included the Cosmos Club in Washington. His first wife, Betty Bath Williams, whom he married in 1943, died in 2006. Survivors include his wife, Joan Dunn Williams of St. Petersburg; three sons from his first marriage, Jon Williams and Stephen Williams, both of Washington, and Peter Williams of Cleveland; four grandchildren; and three great- grandchildren. 