cost production, something administrative allocations are unlikely to achieve. While reducing the excesses of competi­tion, it is also necessary to avoid stagnation.
     Allied to a buffer stock operation, there is need for what the Committee of Eminent Persons (UNCTAD, 2003) pro­posed—action to develop other uses of the commodities and to support producers to move up the value chain. Develop­ing new uses of traditional commodities is one way to ex­pand the market for that commodity. Cassava producers are working to spread the use of cassava not just for animal feed but as the raw material for a food additive, monosodium glutamate, which is very popular in East and Southeast Asia, though there are doubts on whether this is a good substance or not. Lac which is traditionally used as a lubricant is being replaced by artificial substances for this use. But a new food use has developed for lac—coating fruits. This coating both protects the fruit from insect attacks, increasing its shelf life and also makes it attractive to look at.
     For instance some vegetable oils can also be used as diesel substitutes. The use of palm oil has been developed for this purpose. The Malaysian government taxes palm oil exports in years of good prices. In years of low prices, then the money so collected is used to subsidize the use of palm oil as diesel substitute, thus increasing demand for palm oil when prices are low. Finding new uses for commodities would help to increase demand for them. Other vegetable oils could also have similar uses.
     The other measure recommended by the committee is for producing countries to move up the value chain. But the movement up the value chain is hindered by the strong barriers the developed countries have adopted in the form of escalating tariffs. This tariff issue needs to be resolved first. But after that there will still remain the currently inadequate capacity of many LDCs to undertake these movements into processing on their own.
     Another form of movement up the value chain is not into processing,  but into  specialized products;  in other words to switch from generalized commodities to special­ized products. "Shade grown coffee" which commands a price premium as being environmentally friendly is one such high value product. Better qualities of coffee also command higher prices and have a more stable market. Some proces­sors are working with Central American coffee growers to enable them to switch to higher-quality and higher-value products. To what extent the producers get the benefit of higher quality depends on the manner of their integration into the supply chain, something which we will discuss later on. But the very fact of producing a higher value product, something that cannot be easily done by other producers, is likely to increase the bargaining power of the producers.
     Existing WTO rules do not rule out the possibility of international supply side management, with coordinated ac­tion by producers and producing countries. The EU's Agree­ment on Dairy Products was part of the WTO system; it set minimum export prices for milk powder, milk fat and cheese. When it was terminated, the reason was not that it contravened WTO rules but that its members saw no further need for it. In t
     he recent steel crisis in the USA and EU, for in­stance, the WTO Director General, Supachi Panitchpakdi, proposed just such a scheme to reduce production, "The

long-term solution to the problem that has arisen can be found only through the adoption by producing countries of an agreement providing staged reduction in production. Such an agreement could be negotiated under the umbrella of the WTO and supported by the establishment of a World Trust Fund to provide adjustment assistance to industries which would be required to reduce production and compen­sate workers who lose their jobs" (Robbins, 2003).
     Supply side management with the objective of obtaining remunerative prices is explicitly allowed by GATT (Chap­ter on Trade and Development, Part IV, Article XXXVI), "Given the continued dependence of many developed coun­tries on the export of a limited rage of primary products, there is need wherever appropriate, to devise measures de­signed to stabilize and improve conditions of world markets in these products including, in particular, measures designed to attain stable, equitable and remunerative prices thus per­mitting an expansion of world trade and steady growth of real export earnings of these countries" (Robbins, 2003).
     It is a seemingly inevitable feature of such commercial crop intensification that it leads to a specialization in pro­duction and thus reduces the range of local production. In the Himalaya-Hindukush region it is reported that families that used to produce and consume over 20 varieties of food items; consequent upon commercialization they now con­sume only 5 (Nagpal, 1999).
     Such commercialization of products has often, even usually, been accompanied by monoculture of the products. Tea, rubber, potatoes and a host of other upland crops are often grown in plantation monocultures. But the traditional upland cultivation system, both of swidden agriculture and the home garden, is based on multi-species, multi-storey cultivation. Dedicated monocultures would destroy an im­portant part of the value of the uplands, both to the moun­tain communities themselves and to the world at large, as biodiversity is an important global public good produced in the uplands.
     Work done at a number of upland research institutes, such as the Institute of Botany and the Institute of Ecology both at Yunnan (Xie, 1993), has developed models of hu­man-made communities of trees and vegetation that could mimic the diversity of the home gardens. Choosing the com­bination of trees and crops, with an eye both to their com­mercial possibilities and to their use value for the farmers, could yield an overall value that is higher than that of single stand plantations.
     New developments in the market also promote such diverse stands even with commercialization. For instance, there is now a growing market for "shade grown coffee" as against the traditional "sun coffee", which involved the cut­ting of huge areas of forests to turn them into coffee planta­tions. Similarly, in the Himalayan uplands too different tree and annual crops and grass are being simultaneously culti­vated in farmers' plots. In Meghalaya, farmers plant bay leaf trees and broom grass in the same plots. In other areas large cardamom is grown in the forest. In Kunming there are ex­periments to grow vanilla, a high value aromatic crop, in the natural shade of forests, rather than in greenhouses, as is the currently done in the Caribbean islands. Coffee plantations now contain pepper vines, while cashews are combined with pineapple, other fruits and turmeric.