Global Effects of Liberalizing Trade in Farm Products

From the outset, the Liberalization of agricultural trade was at the top of the agenda of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, which got under way in Geneva in 1987 under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). For two or three decades, agricultural trade has been in a state of crisis, occasionally eased by poor harvests in some part of the world. The crisis is the consequence of the increasing protection afforded to the agricultural sector in nearly all industrialized countries. Public discussion of the crisis has been greatly assisted recently by a number of major reports, among them the World Bank's World Development Report for 1986, which was devoted to the crisis and drew, in part, on a study by Kym Anderson and Rodney Tyers. This last analysis was a quantitative assessment of the potential effects of liberalizing agricultural trade in both developed and developing countries. In this Thames Essay, the authors have revised the estimates prepared for the World Bank, which at the time attracted a lot of interest, and included some policy analysis of the policy issues that need to be addressed by governments.