610.1131/442
The British Embassy to the Department of State
Memorandum
His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom are greatly interested in that part of the statement issued to the press by the President on June 21st relating to proposals which are being placed before other American Governments for cooperative economic action by the American Republics and possibly by other countries, to include an effective system of joint marketing of the important staple exports of the American Republics.77
His Majesty’s Government have themselves been making a survey of the problem of dealing with surplus commodities produced in territories of the British Empire and in such parts of the French, Dutch and Belgian Colonies as can be controlled. This survey will include the investigation of the possibility of dealing with surpluses by regulated sales, storage, destruction where necessary, and restriction of excess production.
His Majesty’s Government will give full information to the United States Government on the progress of their survey. They hope that the United States Government will do likewise and that any decisions taken on the United States proposals at the forthcoming Pan-American Conference at Havana78 will not preclude cooperation with them.
The United Kingdom and the British Empire provide the principal foreign markets for a large-range of surplus commodities from North and South America. At the same time British Empire surpluses of commodities which the American Republics also produce might, if unregulated, impinge upon American interests. From the point of view of wartime control and also from that of post war reconstruction it appears to His Majesty’s Government that American regulation and British Empire regulation should be brought into line, and it is their desire to find agreement with the United States as well as with other American countries on this question.
As regards those products of which there is likely to be a world surplus, (e. g. cotton, corn, wheat, edible oils) His Majesty’s Government feel that it is of the utmost urgency that the plans of the British nations and their Allies for dealing with their export surpluses should be concerted with those of the United States and of other states in the Western Hemisphere.
His Majesty’s Government realise that in origin the examination of the United States Government was directed to an economic and political [Page 135] problem while theirs is at least to an equal extent an urgent problem of withholding supplies from Germany and countries under her control. On this aspect of the question His Majesty’s Ambassador is addressing a separate memorandum to the Secretary of State.79
- See vol. v , section entitled “Program proposed by the United States for Inter-American economic cooperation.” For text of the June 21 press statement, see Department of State Bulletin, June 22, 1940, p. 675.↩
- See vol. v, pp. 2 ff.↩
- Memorandum dated July 3, vol. ii, p. 52.↩