Global agricultural trade and developing countries

This book explores the outstanding issues in global agricultural trade policy and evolving world production and trade patterns.The first part of the book replies to the questions raised by researchers and policymakers about agricultural trade regimes and trade performance:"The evolution of agricultural trade flows," by Ataman Aksoy, gives a bird’s-eye view of the changes in global agricultural trade flows since the early 1980s and contrasts these with the progressive global integration of manufacturing "Global agricultural trade policies," by Ataman Aksoy, summarises the state of agricultural protection, using data on domestic support policies from the OECD and tariff data from the WTO for a large set of developing and industrial countries "The impact of agricultural trade preferences on low-income countries," by Paul Brenton and Takako Ikezuki examines the impacts of industrial countries’ established tariff preference schemes"Experience with decoupling agricultural support," by John Baffes and Harry de Gorter evaluates the impact of decoupling measures in industrial and developing countries"Agro-food exports from developing countries: the challenges of standards," by Steven M. Jaffee and Spencer Henson, provides an overview of the impact of food safety and agricultural health standards on developing country agro-food exports"Global agricultural reform: what is at stake?," by Dominique van der Mensbrugghe and John C. Beghin looks beyond the estimates of aggregate welfare gains to structural changes that would emerge from multilateral trade liberalisation in agricultural and food markets, including cross regional patterns of output and trade.The second part of the book offers detailed studies of commodities that are of considerable economic importance to many developing countries:"Sugar: opportunity for change," by Donald O. Mitchell "Dairy: world markets and the implications of policy reform for developing countries", by Tom Cox and Yong Zhu "Rice: global trade, protectionist policies, and the impact of trade liberalization," by Eric J. Wailes"Wheat: the global market, policies, and priorities," by Donald O. Mitchell and Myles Mielke"Groundnuts: policies, global trade dynamics, and the impact of trade liberalisation," by Ndiame Diop, John C. Beghin, and Mirvat Sewadeh "Fruits and vegetables: global trade and competition in fresh and processed products," by Ndiame Diop and Steven M. Jaffe"Cotton: market setting and policies," by John Baffes "Seafood: trade liberalization and impacts on sustainability," by Cathy A. Roheim"Coffee: market setting and policies," by John Baffes, Bryan Lewin, and Panos Varangis.Altogether there are a number of common findings that can be drawn from the above chapters, including:commodity markets exhibit a complex political economy, both domestically and internationally. Identifying superior policy solutions to the current ones is not difficult, but implementing them is, as reforms depend by and large on the power of vested interests a narrow sectoral or product approach is unlikely to be fruitful in WTO negotiationsmicroanalysis is very important for identifying both the key policy instruments that distort competition and the likely winners and losers from global reforms; such an analysis is critical for sequencing reforms and putting in place complementary policiesthe studies identify border protection and domestic subsidies as major factors affecting world markets and thus developing-country consumers and producers, and border protection is more distorting in most markets, with the notable exception of cotton and seafooda development strategy based on agricultural commodity exports is likely to be impoverishing in the current agricultural policy environment.Note: this report is very large in file size. To download individual chapters follow the "further information" to the right of this page.