FROM MANAGEMENT TO LIBERALIZATION: THE SAGA OF AGRICULTURAL TRADE LIBERALIZATION

The history of agricultural trade negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been something of a saga. This saga, re-plete with the sanity-impairing complexities of GATT and idiosyncratic intricacies of agriculture, has unfolded in Wagnerian proportions. Conflicts in each successive GATT-WTO Rounds be-tween 1947-2018 evoke a convincing allusion to a Wagner’s 1865 opera—Tristan und Isolde. Yet, unlike Wagner’s epic resolution, agricultural trade negotiations did not find their perfect cadence. The WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) failed to resolve, or even stem, the escalating tensions. Thus, today, the role of agriculture in international trade remains as contentious as ever, and trade in agriculture occurs not on free terms, but rather is managed through a complex array of legal measures. This dissertation explores the status of agricultural trade and its liberalization under the multilateral trade regime established at the end of the Second World War (1939-1945). As secondary industries grew in trade value and volume, dwarfing the primary sector in these metrics, the significance of agriculture as a commercial sector has clearly faded. However, quantifiable metrics alone do not fully explain the paradox of agriculture. On the one hand, the stature of agriculture, in terms of its contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employment, has fallen. On the other hand, the importance of agriculture in multilateral trade negotiations (MTNs) have risen. The failure to close a deal on agriculture was a key cause of why the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), or Doha Round, collapsed: no deal on farm trade meant no deal on any type of trade. Despite over seventy years since the signature of GATT (on 30 October 1947), agriculture remains one of the most protected and least liberalized sectors in international trade. It is, as some WTO Members say, “managed.” But, this “managed” is an impediment to it being “free”—freed from excessive protection and pernicious subsidization, and conducted on a free rather than managed basis. The historical, political, economic, and even psychological reasons for this resistance for a legal conversion from managed to free trade, tracing the evolution of agricultural policies from the post-Second World War era to the present, with a particular focus on the AoA and its failure to deliver on its promise of creating a fair, market-oriented trading system, is the focus of this dissertation. This dissertation offers a three-pronged thesis captured by the terms “managed trade,” “WTO Plus,” and “political sensitivities.” Taken together, these terms connote the failure to convert agricultural trade from a managed to a free enterprise. First, agriculture, a sector deeply intertwined with national sovereignty, economic stability, and food security, has been consistently, and remains pervasively, managed rather than liberalized. Efforts by GATT-WTO and various regional trade agreements (RTAs) have failed to remove its special protections, leaving agriculture protected through managed trade rather than opened to free trade. Second, because of the failure to achieve trade liberalization at the MTN and RTA levels, WTO Plus issues remain unresolved. Those issues include environmental sustainability and certain sub-sidies relating to social matters. None of them is covered by the AoA, and few of them are touched on by RTAs. Developed countries have used WTO Plus issues to justify their resistance to agree to ambitious trade-liberalizing consensus. Their doing so is ironic, because it is the lack of cover-age of WTO Plus issues in extant trade treaties that ought to catalyze countries to update these treaties. Instead, the opposite has occurred. Third, the lack of progress in agricultural trade reform is due not only to the complexities of the sector, but also because of political sensitivities. These issues are evident in regions as diverse as Quebec and Japan. Indeed, historical case studies, such as the impact of potatoes on European development and the Irish famine, illustrate the dual role of agriculture as a driver of progress and a source of peril—respectively, its potential that ought to incentivize free trade and its perils that impels managed trade. In advancing this three-pronged thesis, this dissertation evaluates the role of RTAs, including three 21st-century free trade agreements (FTAs), namely the September 2017 Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), December 2018 Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), July 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (US-MCA), as well as the bilateral February 2020 U.S.-China Phase I Agreement associated with the Sino-American Trade War, in addressing agriculture as a “WTO Plus” issue. These four deals matter because they are notable efforts, given the failure of MTNs, to liberalize trade in agriculture (prong (1)) by cutting through political and constitutional sensitivities (prong (3)). These RTAs have endeavored to expand beyond the scope of existing WTO rules. Yet, each one has failed to offer comprehensive liberalization. Accordingly, this dissertation concludes that agricultural trade will remain managed and WTO Plus for the foreseeable future, as countries continue to prioritize strategic and political interests over complete liberalization. Is true agricultural liberalization feasible, or even desirable, in the current global trade landscape? The answer is dubious.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.