What’s maybe the most shocking thing about this diet is that this couple jumped on board with it after a recommendation from a different mutual friend, who couldn’t say enough about how great it was for him. After this intentional shrinking/shriveling of the body and stomach, the dieter would then reintroduce healthy foods in gradually increasing quantities until a sort of equilibrium was reached, at which point you’d be healthy forever™. This period was referred to as a “cleanse” by my friends, but as “starvation” to any rational onlooker. This would continue for either 30 days or 45 days, I can’t quite recall. A “meal” might be three small florets of broccoli, for example.
I don’t know all the specifics, and if they ever told me the name of the diet program it went in one ear and out the other, but the gist was this: each day they could eat three meals, but each meal consisted of, essentially, nothing. However, delivering unwavering support was made a little bit difficult by the fact that the diet they chose to propel them to their weight loss goal was borderline insane. Of course, I happily obliged along with everyone else. Not that either of them was particularly large, or that I’d want to ever make that judgment on another person's behalf to begin with, but they announced to us that they were going on something of a weight loss journey together, and asked for moral support.
They, like so many people in modern Western civilization, reached a point in their lives at which they decided it they wanted to lose some weight. They’re married, you see, but I’ve known them for many years. An earlier version of this paper - a product of the Commodity Policy and Analysis Unit, International Economics Department - was prepared as a background working paper for Global Economic Prospects 1994.I have a couple friends - shocking, I know - or rather you might call them a friendly couple. Developed country governments may be forced to decide whether they prefer to see markets controlled by producer cartels (where they will lack representation) or under the auspices of international commodity agreements. But the commodity problem has not disappeared, and producers may look for other mechanisms to raise prices from often very low levels in industries experiencing excess capacity. The existence of active futures markets in all of the industries that have commodity agreements makes justification along these lines problematic. In the current climate, encouraging competitive markets, state interventions are seen as requiring clear justification in terms of market failure. Since the collapse of the tin market in 1985, the belief that commodity market stabilization cannot work has undermined producers' willingness to try to resolve difficulties within existing ICAs and has reinforced the suspicion of consumer governments that these agreements were in no one's interests. In earlier decades, the belief that stabilization could and would improve the position of commodity producers provided the impetus for resolving some of the problems that intervention threw up. This institutional change has been reinforced by the widespread belief - evidenced, for example, by the collapse of the international tin and coffee agreements - that commodity market stabilization through international agreements cannot succeed. Commodity policy is no longer a matter of redistribution from consumers to producers.
In today's less centralized, more competitive world, the winners and losers from commodity stabilization are more evenly distributed across producing and consuming countries. This is a long way from the ideology that gave central place to supply restrictions operating through central marketing boards and quota allocations. Development policy - both as preached by international agencies and as practiced by typically democratically elected and nonsocialist governments in the major producing countries - emphasizes productive efficiency, product quality, and effective marketing. International commodity agreements (ICAs) fit uneasily in a world in which markets are becoming globalized and increasingly competitive. And producer cartels are the main alternative. November 1995 Support for international commodity agreements is waning, but the commodity problem remains.
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