This study challenges the dominant tendency of civil society to negate international trade as such. The authors argue that it is necessary to frame differentiated trade rules based on levels of economic development, and also to shift from subsidies to shore up uncompetitive livelihoods to productivity-enhancing investments.Most importantly, the book ends with a case for trade unions, women's organizations and other civil society organizations to imagine and create themselves as being global -- in order to take up the challenge of strengthening global countervailing power to capital.

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.