This issue of the Annual Supplement to the Foreign Agricultural Trade of the United States introduces a new method of preparing and presenting U.S. trade data. Also, we are using a different color scheme for these issues to distin¬ guish them from the regular monthly publications. Statistics were tabulated by automatic data processing and printed out in photocopy for reproduction. Although changeover to machine processing has delayed this issue, the method is designed to increase the timeliness of future publications and increase the coverage and presentation of the data through more complete commodity and country tabulations. As with all new procedures, automatic data processing involves some changes in methods and data classifications. One outstanding feature of the present pub¬ lication is the use of the "Standard International Trade Classification" (SITC) scheme of the United Nations to classify the various commodity groups. This scheme was adopted to increase the comparability of U.S. trade data with other trade statistics published by various international organizations. Some of these changes are discussed in the SPECIAL NOTICE section of this publication.