World Trade in Agricultural Products: from Global Regulation to Market Fragmentation

From the mid-1960s, the development of agricultural trade between the North and South led to a decisive collapse of the traditional colonial models of the division of labour. The increasing complexity of trade patterns has destroyed the old systems of ‘imperial preference’: what F. Braudel termed ‘les Economies-monde’, have been incorporated into the world economy. The traditional role of the South — low-cost provision of agricultural raw materials to the industrialized nations — is no longer of decisive importance to trade flows and to the world economic system. Indeed, we have witnessed a significant reversal in these flows. Today the countries of the South are increasingly the major customers for the surplus agricultural products, both processed and unprocessed, exported by the advanced economies. According to a recent study by the OECD, the developed nations now account for more than 65 per cent of world agricultural exports.