Because China is the largest buyer of raw materials, its slowdown has abetted surpluses of many commodities — not just oil but also grains and metals.
Europeans cannot conceal their embarrassment over their Common Agricultural Policy that is creating an almost unbearable economic burden, inspiring disruptive trade practices and building mountains and lakes of surplus commodities to prop up the incomes of their farmers.
In the postwar period, farmers, protected by government subsidies and crop loans, managed in most years to produce surpluses of one commodity or another, which accumulated in government warehouses.
They encouraged the constructive use of surplus agricultural commodities and at the same time, safeguarded the interest of commercial exporters and local producers.
Established by the Committee on Commodity Problems (CCP) at its Twenty-third Session (1954) to monitor international shipments of surplus agricultural commodities used as food aid in order to minimize the harmful impact of these shipments on commercial trade and agricultural production.
As Levine and Poppendieck explain, and as I discussed in Food Politics (California, 2007), school lunches started out as a way to dispose of surplus agricultural commodities by feeding hungry kids.
But critics have pointed out that a narrowing of China's broadly measured trade surplus mainly reflects surging imports of commodities like oil and iron ore, and that the renminbi has been rising gradually over the last year against the dollar but actually weakening against other currencies, including the euro.
In the event you breeze through without a single miscalculation, you will have a nice surplus of those three valuable commodities.
Their currencies were appreciating relative to the US dollar and the Euro as a result of both large capital inflows (due to the high relative interest rates) and trade surpluses due the high prices of commodities, which they exported to Asia.
Brazil finished 2004 with a record trade surplus of $33.7 billion, benefiting from surging commodities exports.
Although Brazil enjoys a big overall trade surplus with China, most of its exports are of commodities (mainly iron ore, soya beans and crude oil).
