Agriculture and the WTO: Next Steps

The potential welfare gains from further liberalizing agricultural markets are shown in this paper to be huge, both absolutely and relative to gains from liberalizing textiles or other manufacturing, according to new simulation results of the Global Trade Analysis Project. The probability of the WTO delivering sizeable farm protection cuts in the next round of multilateral trade negotiations would be greater if industrial and service sector negotiations were undertaken simultaneously as part of a comprehensive new round. The immediate challenge for analysts and negotiators is to identify and assess feasible policy packages that facilitate genuine agricultural reform rather than encourage inefficient re-instrumentation of farm support measures. Such assessment will require significant improvements in both analytical tools and databases.