Multilateral Agricultural Negotiations and Multifunctionality: Some Research Issues (original) (raw)

Agricultural multifunctionality in the WTO—legitimate non-trade concern or disguised protectionism?

Journal of Rural Studies, 2002

The extent to which the multifunctionality of agriculture can justify continuing domestic subsidies to farmers that may be trade distorting in their effects, has emerged as a key bone of contention in the current World Trade Organization (WTO) agriculture trade talks. Supporters of multifunctionality point to the contribution of agriculture in terms of food security, rural development and environmental protection. In this paper, we focus on the environmental component in order to examine three interconnected questions. First, how robust is multifunctionality as a policy concept? Second, if multifunctionality is a reality, how valid is the claim made by European negotiators that the liberalization of agricultural policy and the abolition of blue box subsidies threaten the joint production of food and environmental goods in rural space? Third, what are the precise implications of this analysis for agrienvironmental policy design, and the likely compatibility of the European Union's favoured model with current and future WTO disciplines? We conclude that, while multifunctionality is a genuine, and in some respects, unique, feature of European agriculture, it is in relation to the perceived threat of extensive agricultural restructuring to biodiversity and landscape values in the European Union that the concept has been most fully realized. This has profound implications for policy design, suggesting a need to retain some element of income support in the policy mix in order to defend environmental assets against the extreme consequences of farm structural change. We conclude by exploring what these deductions might mean for the future course of the WTO talks and for the long-term design of agri-environmental policy in industrialized countries. r

Food security and trade negotiations in the World Trade Organization

TMD discussion …, 2000

An important issue in WTO trade negotiations is whether further liberalization of trade and agricultural policies may help or hinder food security in WTO member countries, especially the developing countries. The WTO recognizes various classifications of countries: developed, developing, least developed (LDC) and net food importing developing (NFIDC). How well do these categories capture issues of food security? This paper employs various methods of cluster analysis (including an approach based on fuzzy sets) and data for 167 countries to identify groups of countries categorized according to five measures of food security: food production per capita, the ratio of total exports to food imports, calories per capita, protein per capita, and the share of the nonagricultural population share. The analysis identifies 12 distinct clusters characterized by similarities and differences across the various measures. The analysis suggests that the LDC category consists of largely food insecure countries, but that there also are food insecure countries that are not LDCs. NFIDCs is less precise as an indicator of food vulnerability, with more than a third of those countries not falling under any of the food insecure groups. Also, the general category of "developing countries" is very heterogeneous and is not very useful if the focus is on issues of food security. Finally, our typology shows that all developed countries are included in food secure categories. This result suggests that the notion of food security introduced as part of the "multifunctionality" of agriculture, or, more generally, among non-trade concerns has a very different meaning in developed and developing countries. In terms of policy implications and the agricultural negotiations, maintaining the same label for two altogether different situations may only obscure the issues being negotiated.

Multilateral Trade Reform in Agriculture and the Developing Countries

2000

A further round of negotiations on agricultural trade liberalisation began in the WTO in March 2000. This paper discusses the interests of developing countries in these negotiations. Compared to the developed countries, developing countries have relatively few 'rights' to agricultural support under the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and thus have an interest in pressing for a significant tightening of agricultural support disciplines. On the other hand, food importing and least developed countries wish to retain the maximum amount of flexibility to pursue domestic food security and rural development policies and are concerned about the possible negative effects of higher world food prices resulting from a reduction in developed country agricultural support. An important aspect of the negotiations is the extent to which developing countries will be able to, or should, rely on special and differential treatment to reconcile these differences. Developing countries nee...