By PETER EINARSSON

The World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) agriculture agreement is coming up for its first renegotiation. Whether or not the ‘new round’ of the WTO becomes reality, members have committed themselves to revisit the agriculture rules. In an article based on a longer study, Peter Einarsson gives an overview of the agreement and reviews the options available to governments. His conclusion, based on work by a number of NGOs, is that if governments really want to make progress, they must dare to question the absolute priority of the trade liberalisation agenda. More important agricultural policy objectives like food security and sustainability must be put first, and trade rules made subject to them, not the other way around.

Like all the WTO treaties, the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) is based on the firm ideological conviction that trade liberalisation will always bring net benefits to all participants. By removing barriers to trade, regional specialisation will increase. All over the world, regions will specialise in whatever their agriculture can produce more cheaply than others. When they exchange their products, everybody gains because the combined cost of production is less than if each region had produced its own.

In practical terms, this means promoting exports. The basic idea of the AoA is to create the conditions for agricultural exporters to increase their exports, and to limit the right of countries to follow a policy of food self-sufficiency. This makes sense in the simplistic world of trade liberalisation ideology. If more trade is always in everybody’s interest, any impediment to exports blocks the realisation of those benefits and thus harms us all.

In the real world however, cutting the cost of food production is usually not the most important policy objective for agriculture. In most developing countries, basic food security is still the first priority. Providing enough food for all is the issue, not whether local food production can fully compare in economic efficiency with producers elsewhere in the world. Experience indicates that unless there is a stable basis of local food production, food security is very difficult to achieve in a developing country. While international trade can certainly contribute, especially when local harvests fail or even more where there are constant deficits, the notion that it does not matter whether food is produced locally or not lacks credibility. To achieve food security, what most developing countries need are better means to protect and promote their own food supply, not further liberalisation of food trade.

Another first priority objective, equally important to developed and developing coun-tries, should be to return agricultural production to ecological sustainability. Sustainable agriculture involves two core requirements: to preserve the productive capacity of natural systems, and to minimise the use of non-renewable resources. Both requirements are routinely disregarded by almost all agriculture today, and neither is really possible to fulfil unless food production and consumption are kept physically very close to each other. To maintain sufficient production without current leves of chemical inputs and energy use, agriculture must be tailored to optimise use of locally available resources for local needs. In particular, crop diversity and high levels of plant nutrient and organic matter recirculation are essential. In practice, this means that ecolo-gically sustainable agriculture is impossible to reconcile with the far-reaching regional specialisation that is fundamental to trade liberalisation.

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