Sugar and Anglo-Peruvian Trade Negotiations in the 1930s

• Published in: Journal of Latin American studies 1982-05, Vol.14 (1), p.121-142
• Main Author: Albert, Bill
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chambers of commerce; Commercial treaties; Exports; Imports; International agreements; International trade negotiations; Sugar industry; Sugars; Tariffs; Trade agreements
• ISSN: 0022-216X; 1469-767X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X00003606

During the inter-war period the international economy was drastically altered as economic nationalism and the desire for self-sufficiency were strengthened in the aftermath of the Great War. Even Britain, the bastion of free trade, began to adopt protection and trade preference from 1919. The narrowing of European markets had serious consequences for primary commodity producers, many of whom, induced by high war-time prices, had greatly increased their output and used windfall profits to install more modern processes and increase capacity. When commodity prices began to fall from about the mid-1920s, the most common response was to raise output, and this simply helped to push prices still lower. With the Crash in 1929, the position of primary producers changed from bad to catastrophic. Prices collapsed, flows of capital and credit dried up and the already weakened international economy broke into fragments. Countries moved to protect themselves by the introduction of exchange controls, systems of trade preference, higher tariffs and bi-lateral trade agreements. In Latin America the most widely known bi-lateral arrangement was the so-called Roca-Runciman Agreement celebrated between Britain and Argentina in 1933 and renewed three years later.