Agriculture is yet again causing contention in international trade negotiations. It caused long delays to the Uruguay round in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it is again proving to be the major stumbling block in the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations...

For decades, the earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed because of a pro-urban, anti-agricultural bias in own-country policies and because governments in more well off countries are favoring their farmers by imposing import barriers and providing subsidies. These...

The multilateral trade system rests on the principle of nondiscrimination. The most-favored-nation (MFN) clause embodied in article one of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was the defining principle for a system that emerged in the post, Second World War era, largely in reaction...

In 1959, shortly after the European Economic Community was founded under the 1957 Treaty of Rome, Turkey applied for Associate Membership in the then six-member common market. By 1963, a path for integrating the economies of Turkey and the eventual European Union had been mapped. As with many...

The volume-based Special Safeguard Mechanism was proposed as essential for small, poor farmers and became the proximate cause of the collapse of the Doha Agenda negotiations in 2008. But is it helpful for these farmers, given that it is likely to be applied when farm output is depressed and many...

This study uses household models based on detailed expenditure and agricultural production data from 31 developing countries to assess the impacts of changes in global food prices on poverty in individual countries and for the world as a whole. The analysis finds that food price increases...

This study is part of a global research project seeking to understand the changing scope and impact of the policy bias against agriculture and the reasons behind agricultural policy reforms in Africa, Europe's transition economies, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia. One purpose of the...

This survey concludes that including agriculture in the Doha Agenda negotiations was important both economically and politically, although the political resistance to reform is particularly strong in this sector. While agriculture accounts for less than 10 percent of merchandise trade, high and...