Книги

Сборник работ по теме продовольственной безопасности в развивающихся странах. Рассматриваются проблемы недоедания, бедности, состояния предложения и спроса на продовольствие, политика государств и проведение альтернативные политических мер на микро- и макро- уровнях.

Rural growth is necessary for reducing rural poverty. But rural regions cannot generate sustained growth in agricultural demand unless they trade with cities, neighboring countries, and the rest of the world. That is the first problem. The second is that world trade in agricultural and agro-industrial products has grown slower than general trade—and developing countries have not been able to capture as large a share of trade growth in agriculture as in industry. This has constrained agricultural growth and diversification in the developing world.

We argue here that developing countries will have to continue their agricultural policy reforms. But the main focus has to be on the constraints on agricultural trade imposed by developed countries—and on the prospects for reducing them in the current round of WTO negotiations. Export subsidies should be outlawed. Domestic producer subsidies reduced. Access under tariff quotas increased. Tariff escalation on processed agricultural products removed. And the level and the dispersion of bound tariffs on agricultural imports reduced.

In the wake of the November 2001 Ministerial Conference in Doha, the positions of most members of the World Trade Organisation diverge, reflecting a large extent of disagreement within the organisation. This paper attempts to organise these positions and thereby inspire a debate on the possibility of collusion in the coming round of trade negotiations with a particular focus on the options of developing countries. Members’ positions on a range of issues identified as important in the coming round are rated and used as inputs in a correlation analysis and two forms of cluster analyses to identify potential alliances between members with reasonably similar positions. The paper identifies nine clusters of countries that are internally similar. Among these clusters, the positions of most developing countries are most similar to the positions of the so-called Cairns group and the US, whereas the European Union and Norway are significantly isolated and positioned far away from the developing countries. The paper concludes that developing countries have opportunities of forming alliances with specific developed countries in order to promote their trade objectives in the coming round of negotiations.

This paper provides a summary measure of the possible new commitments in the area of market access undertaken by the European Union and the United States, using the Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) as the tariff aggregator. Indicators such as the TRI, based on welfare theory, integrate economic behavioural assumptions within a balance of trade framework. We take the 2000 bound tariffs as the starting point and attempt to assess how much liberalisation in agriculture could be achieved in the European Union and the United States as a result of the present negotiations. We compute the index for agricultural commodity aggregates assuming a specific (Constant Elasticity of Substitution) functional form for import demand. The present levels of the TRI under the actual commitments of the Uruguay Round are computed and compared with three hypothetical cases: a repetition of the same set of commitments of the Uruguay Round, a uniform 36 percent reduction of each tariff, an harmonization formula based on the “sliding scale” scheme. This makes it possible to infer how reducing tariff dispersion would help improve market access in future trade agreements.

Using a partial equilibrium model of world agriculture, we investigate the multilateral removal of all border taxes and farm programs and their distortion of world agricultural markets. These distortions have significant terms-of-trade effects. World trade is also significantly impacted by both types of distortions. Trade expansion is substantial for most commodities, especially dairy, meats, and vegetable oils. Net agricultural and food exporters (Brazil, Australia, and Argentina) emerge with expanded exports; whereas net importing countries with limited distortions before liberalization are penalized by higher world markets prices and reduced imports. The US gains significant export shares in livestock products and imports more dairy products. Without protection and domestic subsidies, the EU loses many of its livestock and dairy export markets.