ABSTRACT
The rhetoric of international conferences, pitting poor nations against rich and developing against industrialized, masks very real conflicts of interest and of philosophy within the bloc of industrialized nations. The short-cut to development through commodity power is accorded both respectability and philosophical justification in the predominantly socialist perspective of third world leaders. The confrontation of developed and developing nations is seen as a worldwide analogue of the class struggle between capital and labor. US and European negotiators, meeting under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, have run into a basic difference of opinion with respect to international commodity agreements governing the prices of their agricultural products. Both the literature of economic development and the rhetoric of international conferences have dealt at length on the disproportionate dependence of developing nations on export earnings generated by primary commodities.
