Les échanges de céréales et leurs implications politiques et économiques

Grain crops have long been a political weapon as their production, processing and circulation are inseparable from deliberate steps taken by the State, steps that may vary or may reinforce one another. The dépendance or the domination of a country cannot be deduced simply by glancing at its trade flow. Everything depends on the importing States to have a hand in the structuring of the economy of the exporting country, with a view to its own imports, or on the contrary, the exporting country's governments abilites to have a hand in the structuring of the economy of the importing country, with a view to its own exports. The increase in cereal trade has not led to less heterogeneous production conditions among competing and interrelated firms in the grain complete. It has modified this heterogeneity and placed it elsewhere in a process in which phases of specialization and despecialization, of concentration and déconcentration alternate. During this process, production conditions and the relations between agents in the cereal complete change. The marginalization of a region or of a country heralds its modernization on a new basis. Some economic and financial agents may have an influence on the reproduction and modified place of the heterogeneous nature of production conditions by means of the monopoly control they exert on prices and technical innovation. Moreover, protectionist measures adopted by the various States give rise to a great many comparative local advantages which can be known and used only by these agents which act quickly and easily on an international scale. In such conditions protectionist policies aimed at protecting some national producers (and which do indeed protect them) at the same time had to the most powerful economic agents being reinforced and to continued instability on the international markets. These are the main points considered here, with France as an example. France, in the process of industrialization, has considerably developed its commercial exchanges in grain crops and from colonization to decolonization has, from being an importing country, become an exporting country. The problems posed by commercial exchanges in grain do not seem to be really specific. They are on the whole those of an international, monopolistic market, divided up into national States.