Negotiations on an international commodity policy have been the central issue on the North-South agenda for the past three years. They also can be seen as the first major effort to give substantive meaning to the Third World's desire not only for a new regime for the world's raw commodity trade...

The Third Development Decade of the United Nations opened with a promising outlook for the developing countries. The economic situation of the OECD countries had improved during 1979 and the "North-South dialogue" seemed to be making progress. But the further course of 1980 and the subsequent...