6 - Ongoing and emerging issues in agricultural trade negotiations

Summary

Given the scope that still remains for economic welfare gains to developing countries from further agricultural and trade policy reforms, as laid out in the previous chapter, what can be done by WTO members? One of the key impediments to members reaching agreement on the DDA package in August 2008 was widespread scepticism about what the DDA would deliver in terms of improved market access. Yet detailed analyses have suggested that even with the proposed flexibilities with respect to sensitive and special products, the gains from the framework agreement of 2008 would have been substantial, and developing countries would have gained disproportionately. Those gains have been estimated to depend heavily on the extent of further trade reforms by developing countries themselves, however, especially as South-South trade continues to grow in importance.

The inability to bring the DDA to a successful conclusion has led numerous WTO members to focus in negotiating bilateral, regional and plurilateral trade agreements. Some already have reached agreement and begun to be implemented, while some very large ones are still being negotiated. The latter plurilateral ones include the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) and the Environmental Goods Agreement (EGA) along with a planned initiative on fisheries subsidies, and regional ones include the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) among 12 Pacific rim countries, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and EU, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) among Asian economies plus Australia and New Zealand. Since both TPP and TTIP involve the US, both may be abandoned when the new US President takes office in January 2017, given the candidates’ pronouncements during the 2016 election campaign. The TPP also faces headwinds in getting through Japan's Diet because of farm trade liberalization sensitivities, as does the TTIP in EU member countries.

Preferential trade agreements may have been easier to conclude than the DDA in recent years because they involve a much smaller number of countries than the full 164 in the WTO.