ABSTRACT
The iniquities of the world’s commodity markets have for long been the subject of criticism. The following account describes the efforts of one group of tropical primary producers to secure a fair return for their produce in the face of an uncertain world market and an imperially-dominated economy during the hard times of the 1930s and 1940s. It suggests that there was little producers could do to affect the long, or even short run fluctuations of the world economy. Government intervention merely brought existing conflicts of economic interest within the government machine, adding to them the divergent and contradictory interests of the imperial government, and tended to work in the interests of the politically, rather than the economically, dominant group; and although the structure of Britain’s imperial economy could operate to the detriment of producers, it could also be exploited by politically powerful producers for their own benefit.
