Food Fights over Free Trade: How International Institutions Promote Agricultural Trade Liberalization

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Food Fights over Free Trade: How International Institutions Promote Agricultural Trade Liberalization. By Christina L. Davis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 416p. $39.50.

Christina Davis's book adds two important insights to our understanding of trade negotiations. First, Davis persuasively argues that complex international institutional factors can alter domestic protection of agriculture. Using the European Union and Japan as cases and marshaling sophisticated statistical evidence, she details historical patterns by which agricultural policy became linked to wider issues and, in the process, allowed trade liberalization to overcome the political advantages that small, well-organized groups, such as farm interests, possess. Second, she documents the contingent character of the politics of trade negotiations. Outcomes emerge not only from negotiating decisions, such as choice in agenda setting and the use of threats, but also from forces external to the negotiations per se, such as budget pressures.