“We Are Giving One Horse and Receiving One Rabbit”: The United States and UNCTAD in the 1960s

This paper examines the emergence of commodity stabilization schemes as a central aim of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) early campaign for economic sovereignty and the political headwinds they faced from an intransigent United States. American stakeholders within and outside of the beltway often understood the Global South’s demands for capital and resource transfer as diametrically opposed to their own economic interests. I argue therefore that U.S. trade policy during this period was driven less by a readiness to dismiss measures conceived to stabilize primary commodity export earnings than the need to balance international commitments with domestic calculations.