Introduction and Overview

Global Agricultural Trade and Developing Countries explores the outstanding issues in global agricultural trade policy and evolving world production and trade patterns. This book presents research findings based on a series of commodity studies of significant economic importance to developing countries. Setting the stage with background chapters and investigations of cross-cutting issues, the authors describe trade and domestic policy regimes affecting agricultural and food markets and analyze product standards and compliance costs and their effects on agricultural and food trade. They then examine the impact and effectiveness of preferences and review the evidence on attempts to decouple agricultural support from agricultural output. Finally, they assess the potential gains from global liberalization in agricultural and food markets, and their sensitivity to various assumptions. Within this broad context of global agricultural policies and reforms, the authors then present detailed studies of commodity markets that feature distorted policy regimes among industrial and developing countries or that are important contributors to exports of developing countries. The commodities analyzed are sugar, dairy, rice, wheat, groundnuts, fruits and vegetables, cotton, seafood, and coffee. These commodity studies analyze current policy regimes in key producing and consuming countries, document the magnitude of these distortions, and estimate the distributional impacts-winners and losers-of trade and domestic policy reforms as well as their impact on trade flows and production location. Global Agricultural Trade and Developing Countries will aid policymakers and researchers in approaching global negotiations and in evaluating domestic policies on agriculture. This book compliments the findings of Agriculture and the WTO: Creating a Trading System for Development.