6 - Agriculture, developing countries, and the Doha Development Agenda

Summary

One of the great achievements of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations was that it brought agricultural policies under much greater multilateral discipline through the new World Trade Organization (WTO). The Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA) converted non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to agricultural imports into bound tariffs. Those bound tariffs were scheduled for phased reductions, as were farm production and export subsidies, between 1995 and 2000 for industrial countries, with developing countries having an extra four years. The URAA required members to return to the negotiating table by 2000.

What are the interests and options of developing countries in the new round of negotiations? This question is pertinent not only because the vast majority of the world's poor are farmers in developing nations, but also because numerous such nations are less than happy with the URAA outcome. Those concerns must be addressed if the new round is to succeed.

Protection rates on agriculture in OECD countries remain huge. What's more, “dirty” tariffication – the setting of bound rates well above applied rates – and the introduction of tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) in the URAA mean that much bigger commitments will be needed this time significantly to reduce agricultural protection. Reforms in other sectors will also influence agriculture in developing countries, not least because including them in the negotiating agenda can counter farm protectionist lobbies. Adding new issues such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to the agriculture agenda could complicate matters by diverting attention from traditional market access issues.