ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship of American agriculture to international agricultural trade. Three major themes have dominated policy and academic discussions of the relationship of international trade to the development and future of American agriculture. They are: (1) excess capacity, (2) instability, and (3) change in the structure of international agricultural commodity markets. The idea that the problem of American agriculture is excess capacity has the longest and most continuous presence of any of the three themes. Domestically, excess capacity as too much production has been addressed by commodity-specific acreage control plans. During the mid and late 1970s, a belief developed that the excess capacity problem had been solved by the rapid expansion of foreign demand for American agricultural products. By the 1970s, US agriculture had come into closer balance with the world market in terms of the association between international and domestic prices for agricultural commodities.
