The twentieth session of the South Pacific Commission was held at Commission headquarters in Nouméa, New Caledonia, from October 13 to 23, 1959. It was attended by representatives of the six member nations, Australia, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States; the Chairman was Dean Knowles A. Ryerson, Senior Commissioner for the United States. The meeting studied progress made during the past year by the Commission in its three main fields of work —economic development, health, and social development—and reviewed its work program for 1960.

The sixth annual meeting of the Council of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was held in Washington, D.C., from May 31 to June 2, 1960, under the chairmanship of the United States Secretary of State, Mr. Christian A. Herter. The inaugural address was delivered by Mr. Richard M. Nixon, Vice-President of the United States. Members of the organization were represented by either their prime ministers or their foreign ministers, according to the press.

The sixteenth session of the contracting parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was held in Geneva from May 16 to June 4, 1960, under the chairmanship of Mr. Edmundo Barbosa de Silva (Brazil). One of the major decisions taken at the session was the creation of a council to expedite business between regular meetings. Membership in the council was to be open to all the countries adhering to the trade pact that were ready “to accept the responsibilities” of such participation. The council was to deal with urgent matters arising between GATT's semi-annual plenary sessions and to take over the work of the permanent committee dealing with import restrictions for balance-of-payments reasons, as well as supervise the work of various other subsidiary units. The terms of reference of the council were said to contain an escape clause to allow a dissenting country not to be bound by decisions taken, in that members might appeal rulings, which would then be suspended and acted upon at a subsequent plenary session.

The twelfth session of the Council of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) was held in Naples, May 5–13, 1960. Representative Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania was chairman of the session. A highlight of the meeting was the ceremony honoring the one millionth migrant to be resettled by ICEM, an eleven-year-old Latvian boy named Andrejs Suritis, who subsequently flew to the United States with his father.

The International Sugar Council, meeting in London early in April 1960, reportedly increased Cuba's export quota by 395,260 metric tons, effective on April 1. This was the biggest single increase made by the Council in reallocating 741,500 metric tons that were expected to be unfulfilled in 1960; a further 42,500 tons of quotas unlikely to be used was not reallocated.

The International Wheat Council held its twenty-ninth session in London, April 5–12, 1960, under the chairmanship of Sir Edwin McCarthy (Australia), for the purpose of reviewing the world wheat situation in accordance with Article 21 of the 1959 International Wheat Agreement. Representatives of 30 countries or territories attended the meeting, along with observers from the UN, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the European Economic Community. According to the press, the results of the first annual review of the world wheat situation, published on May 25, 1960, confirmed that the national wheat policies of the majority of exporting and importing countries were in open conflict with international realities, inasmuch as the world wheat market had been overshadowed for the past five years by burdensome surpluses and, despite government-assisted programs which had raised the volume of world wheat and flour exports to over 30 million metric tons a season, there was no prospect that the imbalance between supplies and demand would disappear during the next five years.