Finding data on WTO Agriculture agreements

The WTO's framework of trade agreements for agricultural policies is complex. The WTO Agreement on Agriculture (supplemented by rules in the GATT, the Subsidies Agreement and the SPS Agreement) regulates the external impacts of countries' border barriers and the impact of their internal market manipulation policies on external competition. It's impossible to make useful assessments of the openness of global agricultural markets without a lot of specialized data related to Members' compliance with these agreement. But the data is remarkably difficult to find.

All of the data comes from Members WTO 'schedules' of tariffs and from Notifications submitted by the Member governments of WTO. You would think that, in the interests of trade transparency and to promote the effectiveness of the Agreement, WTO would do everything it could to make it easy to discover just who was doing what (mostly with your money). You might imagine that the Organization would publish a database of agricultural barriers and subsidies, for example, on the Web. You would think that they would extract the information from the thousands of notifications they receive from governments so that analysts could quickly find the details by country, product, year, type-of-restriction etc.

But they do not. The WTO does not even publish an up-to-date database of Members' agricultural tariffs bindings; instead they make the original data available, spread out over hundreds of spreadsheets that can be accessed from Members' pages or from the sprawling 'status of schedules' page.

So what are the alternatives?

For WTO notifications related to the Agriculture agreement, you can comb through the WTO's "DocsOnLine" database of Members' notifications to find the data, or use the 'shortcuts' provided on the WTO's 'Gateway' page for agriculture. But—as in the case of the tariff schedules—you'll have to extract the data from the original documents (mostly MS Word files) and make your own summaries. This is what I did for the database of SPS measures I built a year or so back.

Or, if you're feeling lucky, you could check the most recent Annual Reports of WTO, which often contain summary tables of some of the data from the past year.

Fortunately, the United States Department of Agriculture has filled the gap for several of the most important data series in the WTO notifications (duties, export subsidies and production subsidies). The USDA site is not pretty, but it is much more functional than anything the WTO supplies. You can find both summary spreadsheets and, if you're comfortable with the jargon, small on-line databases that allow you to drill down to the detailed level of the data buried in the heap of Member notifications.

USDA WTO Agricultural Trade Policy Commitments Database

Tags for this entry: trade wto data agriculture subsidies tariffs