This article analyses the instability observed in the world wheat, coarse grains and sugar economies in the seventies. By means of a decomposition method, the dissemination of domestic production instability into internal utilization adjustment (absorption) and trade variation (rejection) is first assessed for selected countries. Applied at the world level, such a decomposition permits next to evaluate the relative share taken by thesame countries in the burden of world-pooled production instability. Unlike most studies dealing with world price stabilization, the analysis shows no systematic relationship between the extent of domestic absorption of national production instability and the sharing of world production instability or, conversely, between domestic burdenshifting and international destabilization.
