Trade AND DEVELOPMENT

Trade Policy Advice Program: Food Security and Agricultural Negotiations

Financed by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO)
 

Along the negotiations on agriculture, a number of countries tabled proposals calling for flexibility in order to guarantee the security of the supply of and access to food to the urban poor, to protect the agricultural sector and to support rural development, emphasizing the importance of agriculture in their economies. They have been calling for policy space in order to implement food and agricultural policies conducive towards economic growth (and therefore poverty reduction), food security, rural development and non-trade concerns alike.

The Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (seco) had tasked IDEAS to implement a project with the objective to contribute to a common understanding on the concepts of food security, their relationship to agricultural trade policies and their impact on agricultural negotiations at WTO.

In this process, IDEAS had been conducting an analysis of recent research, made an issues-mapping with trade negotiators and participated in the cycle of conferences "Policies against Hunger", organized by the German Government.

The project was implemented in close cooperation with the seco. In the course of the project, IDEAS prepared papers on food security and agricultural negotiations, conducted interviews with trade negotiators from countries with specific food security-related interests and developed concepts on how to give the food security dimension of trade its space within the negotiating cycle of the Doha Development Agenda .

In the course of the Doha process, discussions and negotiations had been moving away from the fundamental issue of food security and trade. Negotiations had been focusing more and more "symptom matters" rather than root causes, such as the impact of a elimination of export subsidies on the availability of food aid. With this evolution of the negotiating process, the potential of the project to really contribute to a pro-development result of Doha became limited and it was therefore concluded early 2006.

It is our view that by neglecting the fundamental relationship between trade, poverty and food security, the Doha Round is on the way to miss a unique opportunity to really mark the difference, to move a step forward and to target the objective of global welfare creation in favor of all and particularly in favor of the poor of the world. Instead, mercantilism, absence of long term vision and short term concerns dominate the agenda.

For further background reading, please refer to: "Food Security and Agricultural Negotiations Issues Paper", on this site under Documents.