Importance Of Agreement On Agriculture

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Agriculture has traditionally benefited from special arrangements which sheltered it from the full impact of GATT disciplines. Even today, in the WTO agricultural policies are covered by a separate agreement that, to a degree, still shelters it from generally applicable rules. A variety of political, social, economic and cultural arguments are used to justify this special treatment. The main justification is the need to guarantee, over time, stable food supplies in a world of fluctuating harvests and potential scarcity. The Uruguay Round achieved two things in relation to agriculture. It introduced specific disciplines on market access, domestic support and export subsidies. The Agreement on Agriculture seeks to reduce restrictions on trade in agricultural products by introducing disciplines to increase market access, reduce domestic support measures and reduce subsidized exports. The Agreement on Agriculture is one of the key agreements within the WTO system. The Agreement on Agriculture is also to discipline and reduce all subsidies, while at the same time leaving scope for governments to design effective agricultural policies. The WTO agreements allow WTO members to protect their markets. The Agreement on Agriculture sets out general criteria and conditions for exemption to the commitment to reduce domestic subsidies. Measures are known as the Green Box. Green Box support measures are considered economically neutral. Therefore, the WTO does not impose any financial limitation to this type of domestic support. The fundamental requirement to qualify for a Green Box exemption is that support measures should have no, or at most minimal, distorting effects on trade or production. The Blue Box exemption category of the Agreement on... ... middle of paper ... ...evelopment. However, since prices of global IT are falling, the terms of trade are shifting against major exporters. Nevertheless, with elastic demand the demand effect offsets the terms of trade effect so that most net exporters experience net gains from trade. Before the ITA was signed, investment, production, and trade in IT products were already highly globalized. The years well before the ITA was conceived, the US, EU, and Japan had big export interests. First, it was a sectorial agreement that was negotiated in isolation from a multilateral trade round, rather than being part of a single undertaking. The broad outlines of the agreement were broached by the business advisory group and interested country partners including the United States, Japan, Canada, and Mexico in the context of the 1996 summit year of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

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