Posts tagged…Agriculture
Razzing the Congress party
Thu, Apr 16 2009"[The Indian election] exposes the do-nothing, zero-reform record of Manmohan Singh, prime minister, and his government. More generally, it lays bare India’s huge reform gaps and its brittle, decaying institutions. Finally, it deflates the ‘India hype’ peddled by smooth-talking upper-caste politicians, ambassadors, businessmen, management consultants and some academics"
Extract from an Op Ed by…
Read more…Illustrated USDA economic research
Thu, Apr 09 2009This should be fun. Unfortunately the 'interactive' version loads slowly and has 'panes' that make it difficult to view the info-graphics. The (16.8mb!) downloadable version may be better. But the download crawled, so I gave up.
"This book contains a sampling of recent ERS research illustrating the breadth of the Agency’s research on current policy issues: from biofuels to food consumption to…
Competitiveness of U.S. agriculture
Tue, Mar 31 2009
As usual, the export outlook depends more on the dollar exchange-rate than on the impact of recession on underlying demand—at least, from 2010 onwards:
"The main uncertainty for the long run concerns the value of the U.S. dollar compared with currencies of other major trading countries. One possibility is that the dollar will continue to strengthen substantially, especially against the Chinese…
Finding data on WTO Agriculture agreements
Mon, Mar 09 2009The 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…
EU incentives for milk production
Sun, Jan 25 2009
The re-introduction of intervention-buying and export subsidies for milk products in the EU comes after the steady fall of EU milk/milk-product prices to near the (undistorted) world market price over the past decade. The 'gap' between the distorted EU price and the undistorted world price is the 'nominal rate of assistance' (NRA) to EU milk that can be plotted in the Agricultural Incentives…
Export subsidies: there they go again
Sun, Jan 25 2009Demonstrating, once again, its cynical regard for the letter of its obligations, the EC Commission has decided to reinstate dairy export subsidies that are primed to lock-in the low world dairy prices that are allegedly their rationale.
"The European Commission has announced plans to artificially boost prices by buying up 139,000 tonnes of diary products at a cost to the public purse of £237…
A Pisgah sight of the Doha deal
Mon, Dec 08 2008(Update: the Ministerial meeting will not take place) Ahead of a likely attempt by WTO Minsiters to spy the promised land before the year is out In one last attempt to wrest consensus from growling discord, the (retiring) Chair of the WTO Agriculture Negotiations has released another version of his 120-page 'modalities' paper (.pdf, about 1mb) for the proposed Doha Round agreement on Agriculture.…
A better way to negotiate on agriculture
Thu, Dec 04 2008Next week, at the Institute for International Trade in Adelaide, Andrew Stoler (Institute Director, former Deputy Director-General of WTO) and I are presenting a conference in our project on future frameworks for WTO agriculture agreements.
In addition to our own research (some linked here) we've commissioned the help of leading agriculture and trade policy research centers in Brazil, China,…
“Sensitive” farm quotas revealed
Thu, Aug 14 2008Details are starting to emerge of the expansion in import tariff-quotas in the EU that might have conceded included in a Doha deal. They are large numbers by any measure, because the EU now comprises 27 middle and high-income economies.
The global tariff-quotas—open to all suppliers—would have been:
- Beef: 290,000 tonnes
- Sheepmeat: 42,000 tonnes
- Butter: 69,000 tonnes
- Cheese: 79,000 tonnes
- Sugar:…
Next steps for agriculture agreements
Wed, Aug 13 2008The WTO's Doha Round of trade negotiations did not 'collapse'; they failed. The failure was not caused by the disagreement over the Special Safeguard Mechanism. The poor quality of the proposed agreements reflected much deeper problems that might also have caused the collapse of consensus. The Doha enterprise had priorities that were no longer aligned with the commercial realities of world…
Doha defeated by contrary goals, rear-view mandate
Sat, Aug 02 2008Joseph Francois argues the Doha Round was strangled by an outdated agenda and unworkable principles, including the MFN rule. We're better-off burying our mistakes, he argues, and moving on.
"In a sense, developing countries are collectively asking that food prices go up and down at the same time. The inconsistency reflects divergent interests across the newer, non-OECD members of the WTO. It also…
Go back? Go forward? Take a powder and lie down?
Fri, Aug 01 2008Well…the third of these is not an option except, possibly, in Europe where dispirited WTO delegates can drift off to the beach for the summer holidays. Simon Evenett—to whose work I've recently refered—is not at the beach, it seems. He has prepared a very timely paper for VoxEU.org on the best way to manage the collapse of the Doha negotiations.