Agricultural Protection and Stabilization Policies: Analysis of Current Neomercantilist Practices

The years 1972-1977 were traumatic for those who had responsibility for food and agricultural policies of industrial nations. Old notions of the problems to be faced had to be discarded; well-established political alliances were shaken by new interests; entrenched policy instruments had to be resharpened in a new cause. It was a period of heightened uncertainty, and the responsibility of decisionmakers was widened to include concern with economic stability on the domestic front and with the security of food supplies to low-income countries abroad. But the experiences of that period should not be seen as an aberration, to be forgotten in more normal times. Indeed those experiences have illuminated many of the problems of the agricultural trading system for the past twenty-five years and put into sharper focus the relationship between domestic farm and food policies and the international market for temperate-zone agricultural products…