Free trade and Agriculture in the Global South

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"Agriculture is undoubtedly the most important activity for the majority of the world’s poor, and at the same time it is the most protected sector in industrial countries" (Mlachila, 2010). Agriculture continues to play an important role throughout the world, while in recent years, farmers have been negatively and positively affected by the trade agreements established by both the WTO and Fair Trade system; specifically the banana and coffee farmers. The government's role was to liberalize trade by reducing tariffs and they initiated this by introducing GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs). This was an agreement between countries that slowly expanded to include countries. Agricultural Trade was left out of the GATT due to the U.S. and European Union "banana war." This is a trade dispute between the US and EU on how the bananas are sourced and imported, even though neither one of these countries are the banana growers. The GATT was later re-established as the WTO (World Trade Organization). As Weis stated, "The WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) came into effect in 1995 and constitutes a major landmark in the development of the global food economy as its set in place, for the first time, multilateral rules restricting the sovereignty of governments to establish their own agricultural policies" (Weis, 2007). Their focus was to establish a fair and market-oriented agricultural trading system, while their objective was to entrench and extend the rights of transnational capital in trade and investment, doing so by reducing unnecessary barriers to trade and discriminatory trade practices of governments. Unfortunately, the WTO had a difficult time satisfying these goals. The Fair Trade system, on the other hand, was "intro...

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...ved from http://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/black-gold-illustrates-coffee-farmers-plight/

Parvathi, P. (2013). Fair trade and organic agriculture in developing countries: A review. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08974438.2013.736043

Silva, S. (2010). Fairtrade, the windward islands and the changing eu banana regime. Retrieved from http://www.secretariat.thecommonwealth.org/files/228967/FileName/THT74_e-copy.pdf

Taylor, P. (2010). The future of fair trade coffee: dilemmas facing latin america's small-scale producers. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09614520600562397

Weis, T. (2007). The global food economy: The battle for the future of farming. Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing.

World Trade Organization, W. (2001). Trade liberalisation statistics. Retrieved from http://www.gatt.org/trastat_e.html

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