Summary from the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) Briefing, December 1987:

The international trading system is in a state of deep crisis—and nowhere more so than in the case of temperate commodities. While output and productivity in the OECD economies has continued to increase sharply, world demand has stagnated. The consequences has been a massive build-up of stocks, a fall in real prices to their lowest levels in fifty years and, on the political front, a thinly disguised EEC-U.S. agricultural trade war. This trade war has had an especially severe effect on other agricultural exporting nations, including a number of developing countries. These two briefing papers offer sharply conflicting views of the causes of the crisis and the policy options available. Both of them, however, underline the urgent need for an end to the current subsidy war and the restoration of order in world agricultural relations. 

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