Commodity Credit Corporation

The Commodity Credit Corporation holds a federal charter under the Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act, Public Law 80-806 (chapter 704, 62 Stat. 1070), "An Act To provide a Federal charter for the Commodity Credit Corporation," approved on June 29, 1948. The Act dissolved an earlier corporation of the same name organized under the laws of Delaware and transferred its rights, duties, assets and liabilities to the new body, as the Government Corporation Control Act of 1945 required of wholly owned government corporations.¹

Charter

Section 2 of the Act sets out its purpose and form: "For the purpose of stabilizing, supporting, and protecting farm income and prices, of assisting in the maintenance of balanced and adequate supplies of agricultural commodities... and of facilitating the orderly distribution of agricultural commodities, there is hereby created a body corporate to be known as Commodity Credit Corporation... which shall be an agency and instrumentality of the United States, within the Department of Agriculture, subject to the general direction and control of its Board of Directors."¹

Section 4(i) limited its borrowing: "the total of all money borrowed by the Corporation, other than trust deposits and advances received on sales, shall not at any time exceed in the aggregate $4,750,000,000."¹

Export Credit Guarantees and Iraq

Under its GSM-102 and GSM-103 programs the corporation guarantees repayment to American banks that finance foreign purchases of American farm products. Iraq became eligible after the administration of Ronald Reagan removed it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982. Iraq's share of the guarantees rose from 8 percent in fiscal 1983 to 26 percent in fiscal 1988, when it received more than a billion dollars and was the second largest recipient. Guarantees for Iraq under the Commodity Credit Corporation Iraq Program from 1983 to 1990 came to about five billion dollars. The principal lender under them was the Atlanta branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. The trade embargo of August 2, 1990, ended the program with about two billion dollars of Iraqi guarantees outstanding.²

Representative Henry B. Gonzalez told the House on May 18, 1992, that after the FBI raided the Atlanta branch in August 1989, "investigators uncovered massive fraud, placing the entire CCC Program for Iraq in jeopardy," and that the White House and the National Security Council, "armed with National Security Directive 26, sprang into action in order to save the CCC Program for Iraq."³