Food Trade and Foreign Policy : India, the Soviet Union, and the United States

When U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz announced in 1974 that "food is a weapon," he voiced a growing national belief in the political power of food resources. President Carter's 1980 decision to embargo grain sales to the Soviet Union appeared at first to confirm this popular notion. But can exporting nations, such as the United States, really use food as a powerful instrument of foreign policy? If so, are they using that weapon more frequently? Are importing nations taking steps to reduce their vulnerability? Challenging the view that food has emerged as a political weapon, Robert Paarlberg undertakes the first systematic inquiry into the relation between food resources and international power.Paarlberg maintains that food trade is seldom manipulated for reasons of foreign policy, due to the greater priority assigned by most nations to domestic food and farm policy objectives. To support his argument, he reviews the recent grain trade experience of three significant and divergent nations--India, the Soviet Union, and the United States. He then examines in detail two exceptional instances in which the coercive power of the U.S. food weapon was put to the test: Lyndon Johnson's manipulation of food aid to India in 1965-1967 and the Carter embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union in 1980-1981. He concludes that the difficulties experienced in each instance only reinforced the larger trend against linking grain trade policy to foreign policy--a trend that can be applauded by those concerned with world food security and trade efficiency.Robert Paarlberg's challenge of the food power concept provides a valuable comparative insight into the conduct of national as well as international food policies

Michael C. Webb explores a central question about postwar economic history: how has the growth of international markets affected the coordination of economic policy among nations? His analysis overturns the popular assumption that policy coordination has eroded as American hegemony has receded. Instead, he argues that the growing mobility of capital forced governments to abandon the strategies they had used in the 1950s and 60s to insulate monetary and fiscal policies from international influences, and to move toward more direct coordination of central economic strategies.

Webb shows that since 1945 there has been a crucial shift in the pattern of international collaboration. He focuses on three types of adjustment policy: trade and capital controls, balance-of-payment lending and intervention in foreign-exchange markets, and monetary and fiscal policies. Noting that the first two types are no longer effective, he demonstrates that governments now rely more on monetary and fiscal policy coordination to regulate the global economy.

As the expansion of international finance created greater turbulence in the global economy in the 1980s, the liberal system of international trade threatened to collapse. Webb examines in particular how the United States, Japan, and Germany took unprecedented steps to coordinate monetary and fiscal policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, although domestic political obstacles—not any decline in U.S. power—limited the impact of this policy coordination. He concludes by assessing the effectiveness of these attempts to reconcile the goal of a stronger liberal system of economic exchange with the desire to maintain national autonomy.

Contents Preface Introduction 1. The Food Power Presumption 2. India: Domestic Sources of Grain Trade Policy 3. The Soviet Union: Retreat from Food Power 4. The United States: Food Power Forgone 5. Testing Food Power: U.S. Food Aid to India 1965-1967 6. Testing Food Power: Embargo on U.S. Grain to the Soviet Union 1980-1981 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index