This book provides an interesting practical background for those not in the business of buying and selling grain but who are peripherally involved in commodity contracts. It will also be of service as a primer to novices embarking upon careers as traders and whom the author’s foreword states he has within his sights. It is useful, particularly to London lawyers, to learn of the NAEGA standard form, which the trade is increasingly using, especially in contracts where one of the parties is domiciled in the United States. The book is pleasingly printed with very few errors, in an easy and articulate style.

In Chapter 1, “The Importance of Contracts”, Mr Slabotzky mourns the erosion of the hallowed precept of grain traders “my word—my bond” and their increasing recourse to litigation in order to avoid the obligations of their undertakings. The reason is not expressed by Mr Slabotzky but is unconsciously presented in Chapter 2, “How Purchases are Made”. He remarks that young traders no longer do as they did in the “old” days, which was to “spend long hours poring over the language of contracts, as the most logical introduction to the grain trade”. But witness the author’s reference to the standard terms of printed contractual forms as being “simply the smallprint governing the fulfilment of the contract”, inadvertently demonstrating the hazardous attitude of traders towards the standard contracts to which they so casually fix their names, cosily imagining safety in the numbers who use those forms. The conclusion is irresistible that the failure of contracts to bind parties in modern times is, at least partly, owing to the ignorance of many traders of what they have agreed. Ask even an experienced trader what free pratique or force majeure means and he is likely to be discomfited. Yet these are examples of standard terms of many commodity contracts. A major and fortuitous contributing factor to diminishing knowledge by the parties of the terms of their agreement, and the numbers of contracts that are faithfully performed, is the widespread and increasing use of standard contractual forms. These have their genesis in their creators’ grand design, expressed by FOSFA, to “establish greater uniformity in commercial usages, forms of contract and other documents, and the voluntary adoption of such contracts and documents by the trade internationally” and to achieve “the ideal of contracts freed from the possibility of misunderstanding and dispute”. However, contracting parties today use those forms with only a hazy idea of their content and of the increasing volume of legal precedent surrounding their words. Even the author believes that the NYPE arbitration clause requires a court appointment of an arbitrator. In fact, the clause provides for each party to appoint an arbitrator and for those two arbitrators to appoint a third. It is rare, at least in England, for this clause to require the intervention of the courts.