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2016 | Buch

Introduction and Summary Kapitel lesen Erstes Kapitel lesen

Agricultural Trade, Policy Reforms, and Global Food Security

verfasst von: Kym Anderson

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US

Buchreihe : Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book explores the potential for policy reform as a short-term, low-cost way to sustainably enhance global food security. It argues that reforming policies that distort food prices and trade will promote the openness needed to maximize global food availability and reduce fluctuations in international food prices. Beginning with an examination of historical trends in markets and policies, Anderson assesses the prospects for further reforms, and projects how they may develop over the next fifteen years. He pays particular attention to domestic policy changes made possible by the information technology revolution, which will complement global change to deal directly with farmer and consumer concerns.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction and Summary
Abstract
If global food production is to keep up with the growth in food demand, the productivity of resources employed in agriculture needs to increase. That can happen by investing more in agricultural research, but that is expensive and involves decades to yield results. There is a far more immediate and lower cost way to enhance global food security sustainably, namely, by reforming policies that are distorting food prices and trade. While this has been tried and proven in some places over the past three decades, much more can be gained by encouraging such policy reform in places yet to start, and by cheering the process to completion in places where reform is still on-going. This chapter summarizes the rest of the book, which explains how.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 2. How Trade Can Boost Food Security
Abstract
Openness of each national economy to international trade and investment optimizes the use of resources devoted to producing the world’s food, maximizes real incomes globally, and minimizes fluctuations in international food prices and quantities traded. It thereby contributes to three components of food security: availability, access, and market stability. It should therefore be considered among the food policy options of national governments, as it can reduce poverty, hunger, and under-nutrition; boost diet diversity, food quality, and food safety; and thus boost national and global food security. These gains derive not just from the fact that openness enables citizens to consume more of everything, including food, but also from the fact that openness to trade can raise an economy’s growth rate.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 3. The Long History of Food Globalization
Abstract
Long-distance agricultural trade has contributed to global economic growth and poverty reduction for millennia, but only in recent centuries via international trade in major foods. Its predominant contribution in earlier periods was through trade in crop seeds or cuttings, breeding animals, and farm production technologies. Since 1800, the ever-lowering cost of international commerce gradually allowed trade in farm outputs in raw or processed form. That has led to the prices of farm and other products converging across countries and indeed continents and, hence, to relative factor prices also converging. But trade restrictions at national borders have limited trade between relatively lightly populated economies that are well-endowed with agricultural land and those that are densely populated—as have sectoral and exchange rate policies.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 4. The Evolution of Food Trade Patterns Since 1960
Abstract
Developments in global agricultural trade, ‘revealed’ comparative advantage, and net trade specialization in farm products over the past five decades are broadly consistent with expectations from trade theory, even though trade patterns have been distorted (as well as being shrunk) by anti-trade policies. There is concentration in both the commodity and country shares of global exports of farm products: as of 2014, less than ten items made up half of that trade in agricultural products, and two-thirds of the world’s exports of farm products are accounted for by just a dozen agricultural trading economies (treating the EU28 as a single economy). One consequence of little food production being traded internationally is that just a few countries dominate each product’s international trade.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 5. Market-Distorting Policies: Long-Run Trends and Short-Run Insulation
Abstract
Agricultural protection and subsidies in high-income countries have been depressing international prices of farm products for many decades, while governments of many newly independent developing countries maintained anti-agricultural policies. Since those policies had an anti-trade bias, the quantity of farm products traded internationally was less, which made international food prices more volatile. From the mid-1980s, however, many countries have been reforming their trade-related policies. When placed in historical perspective, the reforms since the mid-1980s are as dramatic as the policy changes in the preceding three decades. Despite those policy reforms, most countries continue to insulate their domestic food markets from the full force of fluctuations in international prices, and plenty of diversity in price distortions remains across countries, and across commodities within each country.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 6. Estimating Trade, Welfare, and Poverty Effects of Trade Policy Reforms
Abstract
Global economy-wide modeling results suggest that reforms over the two decades to 2004 brought the world a remarkable three-fifths of the way toward free trade when measured in terms of global economic welfare, benefitting developing countries proportionately more than high-income countries. Had the remaining policies as of 2004 also been liberalized, developing countries would have gained nearly twice as much as high-income countries, further closing the income gap between high-income and developing countries. Of those prospective welfare gains from completing the global trade liberalization process, two-thirds would be generated by agricultural policy changes, even though agriculture and food account for less than one-tenth of global GDP and trade. Such is the degree of distortions still remaining in agricultural markets compared with those in other sectors.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 7. The Interface Between Trade and Technology Policies
Abstract
Concerns that products containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) may be unsafe as food or animal feed, or may harm the environment, have led European countries to procrastinate on approving their production or use despite no evidence of their harm. This policy stance, which has discouraged many developing countries from adopting too, is unfortunate because modeling results show that GM crops offer welfare gains that could alleviate poverty and food insecurity directly, substantially, and relatively rapidly in countries willing to allow adoption of this new biotechnology. The stakes in this issue are very high because the prospective gains from this new technology will increase as climate change proceeds and requires adaptation by farmers to warming and to increased weather volatility and higher costs of irrigation water.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 8. International Food Price Spikes and Temporary Trade Policy Responses
Abstract
Many governments insulate their domestic food markets from gyrations in international prices. The collective impact of such interventions by a large number of countries is to increase the volatility of international prices, and thereby to increase domestic price volatility in more open countries. Yet if a similar proportion of the world’s food-exporting countries insulate to the same degree as a group of food-importing countries, each group will fully offset the other’s attempt to prevent their domestic price from moving as much as the international price. Simple model results suggest the world probably would see less people fall into poverty when international food prices spike if all countries agreed to abstain from altering trade restrictions in the hope of insulating their domestic markets from such spikes.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 9. Political Economy of Trade Policy Trends and Aberrations
Abstract
Understandable domestic political forces drive countries to transition from negative to positive assistance to farmers as their per capita incomes grow and the agricultural sector becomes less significant. They also explain why countries partially insulate their domestic markets from spikes in international food prices. Trade policies pervade as a means of altering both the trend level and fluctuations in domestic food prices, despite being far from the most efficient or equitable instruments for averting short- or long-term losses to significant groups. Given the large gap between their tariff bindings and their actual applied rates, developing countries’ legal commitments in the WTO will not be enough to stop that tendency in the foreseeable future—even if the WTO’s Doha round had resulted in a comprehensive agreement.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 10. Prospective Effects of (or Requiem for?) WTO’s Doha Development Agenda
Abstract
Empirical modeling of trade reform options make clear that there is a great deal to be gained from liberalizing merchandise—and especially agricultural—trade. If it were done multilaterally under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Doha round, a disproportionately high share of that potential gain could go to developing countries (relative to their share of the global economy). Moreover, the poorest people in developing countries are most likely to gain from global trade liberalization, namely farmers and unskilled laborers in developing countries, provided developing countries did not demand Special and Differential Treatment (SDT). To realize that potential gain, it is in agriculture that the greatest cuts in bound tariffs and subsidies are required. However, the political sensitivity of farm support programs have made a Doha agreement elusive.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 11. Projecting International Trade to 2030
Abstract
The world will be able to feed itself adequately in 2030, and at international food prices that in real terms are not greatly different that those just before the global financial crisis and food price spike period of 2008–12. Asia will continue to become more important in the global economy, and especially in markets for primary products. That opens opportunities for natural resource-rich economies to raise their own incomes by expanding their trade with Asia, and more so the faster Asia grows. But agricultural trade would grow less, as would global food security, the more agricultural protection rises in emerging economies in Asia and elsewhere. Unfortunately, regional trade agreements have not been any more able to free up food trade than has the WTO.
Kym Anderson
Chapter 12. Policy Implications and Prospects for Boosting Global Food Security
Abstract
Open markets maximize the benefit that international trade can offer to boost global food security and ensure that the world’s agricultural resources are used sustainably. The declining costs of trading internationally reinforce that message, as does climate change. If global warming and extreme weather events are to become more damaging to food production, they provide all the more reason to be open to international food markets and allow trade to buffer seasonal fluctuations in domestic production. The more countries that do so, the less volatile will be international food prices. Developing countries concerned that poor households would be too vulnerable if food markets were unrestricted can now invoke, at low cost, generic social safety net measures such as conditional targeted income supplements, targeting them to the most vulnerable households.
Kym Anderson
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Agricultural Trade, Policy Reforms, and Global Food Security
verfasst von
Kym Anderson
Copyright-Jahr
2016
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-46925-0
Print ISBN
978-1-137-47168-0
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46925-0

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