Agriculture and the New Trade Agenda

Negotiating the liberalization of world agricultural trade in the World Trade Organization (WTO) is fraught with difficulty due to the complexity of the issues and the wide range of interests across countries. In the round of global trade negotiations under the WTO, different perspectives on trade reform have produced a highly contentious agenda. These issues are addressed from a range of perspectives in this survey of the trade agenda and its implications for both developing and developed countries. Agricultural trade specialists, including those in universities, in international organizations and think tanks, analyse a comprehensive range of topics including interests and options in the WTO trade negotiations, the trade agenda from a development patent perspective, WTO trade rules, trade barriers, tariff negotiations and patent protection for developing countries.

Author Biography

Merlinda D. Ingco is a Senior Economist at the World Bank. Specializing in empirical and policy analyses, her published books and journal articles cover areas such as non-tariff barriers, agricultural protection, agricultural trade and poverty, commodity markets, food security, and trade. She is the author of The World Food Outlook (with Donald Mitchell and Ronald Duncan), CUP, 1997. L. Alan Winters is Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London and a Senior Visiting Fellow of the Centre for Economic Performance, at the London School of Economics. His published books and articles cover areas such as regional trading arrangements, non-tariff barriers, European Integration, East-West trade, global warming, agricultural protection, trade and poverty, and the world trading system. He is the author of a major study funded by the UK Department of International Development: Trade Liberalization and Poverty: A Handbook (with Neil McCulloch and Xavier Cirera) 2001.