ABSTRACT
The study of US foreign agricultural policy making is the investigation of a messy, uncoordinated, conflictive process. Its content is determined by the interplay of domestic and international, political and economic, practical and ideological factors which are constantly being reordered as conditions change. The 1960s represented a transitional period for US foreign agricultural policy, one in which international economic concerns increasingly supplanted domestic considerations in the policy-making process. The reorientation of foreign agricultural policy and the adoption of a new paradigm for economic development in the less-developed countries (LDC) formed the response to these pressures and changes. International Monetary Fund loan policies that were supposed to ease the debt burden of the LDCs compounded the problem of food import substitution. In addition the LDCs had become more united and vocally anti-American as a result of world economic crisis whose effects on them had been devestating.
