The WTO negotiations on agriculture remain deadlocked after four years of discussion, and efforts to find a solution at Cancún failed. Analysis shows that the recent draft Cancún text offers more flexibility than earlier proposals, and such flexibility most likely implies a lower level of...

Proposals for agricultural trade reform put forward by the main protagonists remain far apart, with little sign of convergence. In an attempt to progress the negotiations towards a successful outcome, the chairman of the WTO Committee on Agriculture has proposed a compromise. The alternative...

Bosnia Herzegovina (BH) is in the process of joining the World Trade Organization in the near future and the European Union in the medium term. As a net agriculture and food importer, accession will require BH to expose some of its inefficient and sensitive agricultural industries, such as meat...

Vietnam has negotiated a series of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements and has madesignificant steps in integrating into the world economy. This integration is likely to have bothpositive and negative effects on different stakeholders in the economy. This paper seeks tomeasure the...

Aiming to support downstream processing, the Indonesian government announced an export tax in May 2010. Using a partial equilibrium approach, this paper therefore attempts to analyse: (i) whether the Indonesian government has imposed optimal taxes on cocoa beans; (ii) the impacts of cocoa export...

Trade negotiators are concerned about the possible negative effects of trade liberalisation on employment in specific sectors. The agricultural sector has characteristics that make it different from industrial or service sectors. These are an informal labour force, low productivity, relative...

Following the global spike in food prices in 2008, there is renewed interest in Indonesia in self-sufficiency as a means of achieving food security. Restrictive trade policies, including specific tariffs on rice and sugar, and quantitative restrictions on imports and exports, have been used in...

The Gulf countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates) have a common external tariff that is unusually low with the exception of selected products such as alcohol and tobacco. As exporters of oil and gas and importers of agricultural products, the GCC is...

The WTO negotiations on the reform of agricultural tariffs, export subsidies and domestic support is proving to be increasingly frustrating with little progress since prior to the Cancun Ministerial of August 2003, apart from an agreement to keep talking. In this paper a possible outcome in the...