Developing-Country Agriculture and the New Trade Agenda
Author(s)
Hoekman, Bernard; Anderson, Kym
Abstract
Unilateral trade liberalization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has reduced domestic distortions, while the conclusion of an agreement on agriculture in the Uruguay Round laid the foundations for reducing international price-depressing assistance to industrial-country farmers. The World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations recommenced in early 2000. A question confronting WTO members will be to what extent so-called new trade agenda items–which revolve around disciplining domestic regulatory policies–should be subject to negotiations. We argue in this article that inclusion of regulatory policies would help increase the role of market disciplines in the allocation of resources in the agricultural sector and induce nonagricultural groups to counterbalance forces favoring agricultural protection. We also argue that market-access negotiations should be given priority, as the potential welfare gains from liberalization are likely to be substantially larger than those from rule making. We suggest that rule-making efforts be delinked from market-access talks and that generally applicable rules be negotiated as opposed to sector-specific ones.
