A year ago, there was hope that a plan by the Association of Coffee Producing Countries (ACPC) aimed at retaining about 20 per cent of coffee produce on the world market would ultimately stop the price slide from over US200 cents per pound in the early 1990s to less than US50 cents today. This was the third in a variety of strategies to check the decline, but like the previous attempts to manipulate the market such as the export quota system, it seems to have failed.