Trade Agreements and Agriculture

Abstract

General Status of the Program to Date Two years ago, in a paper on this same subject which I read before the American Economic Association, I reviewed the progress of the trade-agreements program as it affected agriculture. At that time agreements had been signed with nine countries, but only four had come into effect. Since that time agreements have been concluded with seven more countries, and preliminary or final negotiations have been entered into with five more, including the United Kingdom.' We have also begun the negotiation of a new agreement with Canada. The sixteen countries with which trade agreements are now in effect accounted, in 1929, for 37.3 per cent of our exports of all commodities and 37.7 per cent of our imports. If we add the five countries with which we are now negotiating, it appears that the twenty-one countries with which agreements have either been concluded or are in process of negotiation account for 54.8 per cent of our exports in 1929 and 47.8 per cent of our imports. Such figures are enough to suggest that real progress has been made--especially when one takes into account the complexity of the problem that has had to be faced, the nature of which I need hardly pause to describe. They indicate, moreover, that the tradeagreements program is a developing program and not one to be subjected to finality of judgment at any particular stage. In this latter connection, the negotiations now in progress with the United Kingdom-the greatest of all our agricultural markets-assume, for agriculture, a particularly important significance.