ABSTRACT
The U.S. government has been intervening in agricultural commodity markets for more than fifty years. Much experimentation has occurred, but the policies in place in the 1980s were similar to those of the 1930s. Both decades started with government-controlled commodity stock accumulation and soon moved into acreage controls induced by payments to producers as surplus production persisted. However, payments were larger in the 1980s than in the 1930s, and the percentage of cropland idled was the largest in history. The 1980s differed in more fundamental ways also, because of the greatly changed macroeconomic and international environments.
