Discuss And Explain Major International Commodity Agreements

The current pressure that favours agreements. Despite the serious drawbacks, the number of international commodity agreements has tended to increase and there is good reason to expect this trend to continue. On the one hand, the United States, through a series of moderate measures, has moved from doctrinal opposition to these agreements to one in which official policy, as President Kennedy says, “is poised to cooperate on a case-by-case review of commodity market problems.” Such agreements tend to be strongly favoured by less developed countries to “stabilize” (i.e. increase) the currencies they obtain from their main exports. In Europe, international market-sharing agreements have been actively supported by the French authorities for more than a decade. The Federal Republic of Germany, the main importer of agricultural raw materials in the European Economic Community, supports the agreements as instruments for maintaining a place for foreign suppliers in the common market. For similar reasons, an agreement on cereals also received some scientific support (Coppock 1963). In addition, the United Kingdom, which until recently relied on a policy of cheap food imports and a programme of direct payments to its domestic agricultural producers, has begun to conclude a series of agreements with major foreign suppliers of cereals and meat in order to reduce the budgetary burden resulting from a combination of direct payments and unlimited domestic production. and unlimited imports. International commodity agreements significantly draw all external suppliers to short-term benefits and are willing to ignore longer-term disadvantages by securing opportunities on the basis of quotas. Since the end of the Second World War, agreements have been successfully negotiated on wheat, sugar, tin, coffee and olive oil. The 1949 and 1953 International Wheat Agreements (IWA) and the Post-War International Sugar Agreements (ISA) are prototypes of two forms of commodity agreements – the multilateral treaty and the variable export quota. Land prices and sugar caps have been set and, for the most part, imposed by the export regulations authorised by Member States; the sugar agreement also provided that stocks held by exporters were not higher or lower than the percentages indicated by export quotas.