The Chadbourne Agreement (1931) and its impact on the Czechoslovak sugar industry

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1930s, Thomas Chadbourne, a lawyer from Wall Street, assumed the task of finding a new form of international cooperation on sugar production and trade. A new committee was established in Brussels and its activities led to a new international sugar agreement in 1931 signed by several major sugar producers (including Czechoslovakia). It became gradually evident that the Chadbourne Agreement certainly could not affect some of the major problems, which plagued world sugar production – especially the unfavorable trend in sugar consumption that stagnated or even declined in many world regions due to the Great Depression. The document did not involve a true cooperation in customs policy and did not represent a way to a direct abolition or at least reduction of customs tariffs. As for price strategy, the project ultimately failed too since the real price development greatly differed from the desired growth of prices. The Chadbourne Agreement had some negative or at least controversial consequences for the signatory countries and the planned benefits of the Chadbourn Agreement were effectively phased out by the behavior of non-signatory states, which gradually increased sugar production – in some respects only filling the gap that emerged on the world market.