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with the United Nations through agreements defining the basis for their mutual co-operation. It is one of the responsibilities of the Council to " make recommendations for the co-ordination of the policies and activities of the specialized agencies." To date, agreements have been approved with nine specialized agencies, and certain other agreements are now under consideration. These agreements are not standard in form, but are the result of negotiations in each case between the Council and the agency concerned, and reflect the varying interests of the agencies. In some cases serious questions have been raised as to the adequacy of the agreements, but up to the present time all the agreements negotiated by the Council with the Agencies have been approved by the General Assembly. Co-ordination of the policies and activities of the specialized agencies and of the United Nations represents an essential feature of the work of the Economic and Social Council if duplication of functions is to be avoided. It is also important if maximum efficiency in international action is to be achieved. The Council at its sixth session particularly gave detailed consideration to the problems involved, and the procedure for co-ordination has now been clarified. Each of the agencies will present to the Council each year a comprehensive report on its activities over the past year and its plans for the coming year. Study of these by the Council provides the basis for recommendations, where necessary, for closer cooperation between the different agencies. In addition, a Committee comprising the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the administrative heads of all the specialized agencies meets regularly to consider the progressive development of co-ordination. This Committee has available to it the services of a number of consultative committees dealing with particular matters —e.g., Statistics, Personnel, &c. Finally, there are procedures for promoting standardization of budget procedures, and the budgets of all the specialized agencies are presented to the United Nations for consideration and such recommendations as the General Assembly sees fit. One aspect of co-ordinated international action arose at the sixth session from the request of FAO that the Council should consider steps to alleviate the world food crisis. FAO outlined the present position and the action it had taken within its specialized field, but pointed out that, if the crisis was to be met, action was required beyond the jurisdiction of FAO, since many of the bottlenecks impeding food production—e.g., lack of farm machinery, fertilizers, questions of balance of payments, transport facilities, &c. —lay outside FAO's sphere of activity. The Organization accordingly asked the Council to promote international action to deal with these bottlenecks. After discussing the matter, the Council adopted a