Agricultural Trade Policy Issues in the 1980s

It may well be that the 1970s will come to be viewed as marking a seismic discontinuity in world economic affairs. The elements of this turbulent decade are familiar. They include the food and energy crises, a slowdown in economic growth, the onset of the Great Inflation, high unemployment and unused industrial capacity, monetary instability and international payments disequilibria. It was a time when the developing countries forced the subject of their poverty onto the global agenda and when the centrally-planned economies began to become more fully integrated into the world economy. The realities of interdependence between countries required the internationalisation of national policies and the domestication of foreign economic policies, but this clashed with the growing economic and social responsibilities of governments and heightened tensions between international obligations and the desire for national sovereignty. The need for adjustment grew while the ability or willingness to embrace it diminished. Hegemonic leadership and confidence in market forces declined, but collective management of complex and inter-related issues proved difficult to attain in a multipolar world with more numerous actors of diverse stages of development, interests and ideologies. The 1970s was a decade of negotiations aimed to redesign the international economic order on monetary arrangements, trade, development, food, commodities, energy, global commons and other matters, but in spite of all the effort the international economic order continued to deteriorate. At the beginning of the 1980s, unresolved issues and continuing stresses threaten the functioning of the global economic system.