International Commodity Control

Originally published in 1984, at a time when international commodity control was brought from the periphery to the centre of international trade policy, this book provided a new and more comprehensive approach to, and an analytical appraisal of, international commodity controls, from their origins in the 1920s to their widespread acceptance as an important element in international trade policy in the 1970s. The first part establishes the economic and institutional background against which controls were introduced and includes sections on a wide range of issues such as the changing structure of world commodity trade and the roles of GATT, UNCTAD and the former EEC. Part 2 considers the principal control mechanisms which have been used at the international level and review the national counterparts and alternatives. Part 3 assesses on a commodity-by-commodity basis how the control worked in practice. It covers all the international commodity agreements to 1982 and also considers examples of raw material cartels.

November 1995 Support for international commodity agreements is waning, but the commodity problem remains. And producer cartels are the main alternative. International commodity agreements (ICAs) fit uneasily in a world in which markets are becoming globalized and increasingly competitive. Development policy -- both as preached by international agencies and as practiced by typically democratically elected and nonsocialist governments in the major producing countries -- emphasizes productive efficiency, product quality, and effective marketing. This is a long way from the ideology that gave central place to supply restrictions operating through central marketing boards and quota allocations. In today's less centralized, more competitive world, the winners and losers from commodity stabilization are more evenly distributed across producing and consuming countries. Commodity policy is no longer a matter of redistribution from consumers to producers. This institutional change has been reinforced by the widespread belief -- evidenced, for example, by the collapse of the international tin and coffee agreements -- that commodity market stabilization through international agreements cannot succeed. In earlier decades, the belief that stabilization could and would improve the position of commodity producers provided the impetus for resolving some of the problems that intervention threw up. Since the collapse of the tin market in 1985, the belief that commodity market stabilization cannot work has undermined producers' willingness to try to resolve difficulties within existing ICAs and has reinforced the suspicion of consumer governments that these agreements were in no one's interests. In the current climate, encouraging competitive markets, state interventions are seen as requiring clear justification in terms of market failure. The existence of active futures markets in all of the industries that have commodity agreements makes justification along these lines problematic. But the commodity problem has not disappeared, and producers may look for other mechanisms to raise prices from often very low levels in industries experiencing excess capacity. Developed country governments may be forced to decide whether they prefer to see markets controlled by producer cartels (where they will lack representation) or under the auspices of international commodity agreements. An earlier version of this paper -- a product of the Commodity Policy and Analysis Unit, International Economics Department -- was prepared as a background working paper for Global Economic Prospects 1994.

International Commodity Agreements