Niek Koning and Per Pinstrup-Andersen (editors)

Wageningen UR Frontis Series, volume 19. Springer Science & Business Media, ISBN: 978-1-4020-6079-3

Will poor countries benefit from agricultural trade liberalization? This question is of great importance now that efforts are being made to revamp the Doha Round and negotiations on European Partnership Agreements are entering their final phase. The Doha round was called a Development Round, but little was accomplished before the negotiations stalled in mid-2006. The assumption was that developing countries would gain from trade liberalization in agricultural commodities, but whether this is true for the 50 least developed countries (LDCs) remains hotly debated. Will gains from liberalization offset the erosion of the preferential access that LDCs currently have to OECD markets? Or will such gains be captured by middle-income countries with strong export potential in agriculture? Are LDC interests well represented by the Group of 21, which consist primarily of middle-income countries? How can LDCs respond to the continuation of trade-distorting policies of OECD countries? In this book, several experts on international trade and development address these and related questions. Unlike many other books on these issues, they embody divergent perspectives, spanning the whole range from neo-liberalism to new institutional approaches and the vision that managed trade rather than free trade should be the guiding principle for regulating agricultural markets.

Contents

1. Agricultural trade liberalization and the least-developed countries: introduction (Niek Koning and Per  Pinstrup-Andersen)
2. Agricultural trade, development problems and poverty in the least-developed countries: an overview, (Olle Östensson)
3. Making agricultural trade reform work for the poor (Ann Tutwiler and Matthew Straub)
4. Price intervention in Sub-Saharan African agriculture: can an institutionalist view alter our conception of the costs and benefits? (Andrew Dorward, Jonathan Kydd and Colin Poulton)
5. Poverty, land conservation and intergenerational equity: will the least-developed countries benefit from agricultural trade liberalization? (Kimseyinga Savadogo)
6. Trade liberalization in cotton and sugar: impacts on developing countries (André Meloni Nassar)
7. How to increase the benefits of the DOHA development round for the least-developed countries (David Blandford)
8. Improving market access in agriculture for the African least-developed countries: deepening, widening, broadening and strengthening trade preferences (Wusheng Yu)
9. Agricultural trade liberalization under Doha: the risks facing African countries (Ousmane Badiane)
10. The practical experience with agricultural trade liberalization in Asia (David Dawe)
11. What can be learned from the history of developed countries? (Niek Koning)
12. How U.S. farm policies in the mid-1990s affected international crop prices: a harbinger of what to expect with further world-wide implementation of WTO-compliant policy modifications? (Darryl Ray and Harwood. Schaffer)
13. The WTO agricultural negotiations and the least developed countries: limitations and options (Sophia Murphy)

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