Jean-Christophe Bureau

Potential Implications of Animal Welfare Concerns and Public Policies in Industrialized Countries for International Trade

The intensification of systems of agricultural production has generated increasing concern in some countries about the treatment of farm animals. Perhaps nowhere are these concerns more apparent than in Europe. Wide-ranging legislation governing the treatment of farm animals exists in many European countries and at the multinational level through the European Union (EU). Private initiatives on the development of standards for the production and marketing of food products have emerged in some countries in response to public concerns over animal welfare. The EU accounts for roughly 50 percent of the trade in live animals, meat, and livestock products by the members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).1 Private and public actions relating to animal welfare have potentially broad-reaching implications for agricultural practices in the countries concerned, and beyond their borders through effects on international competition and trade.

EU Agricultural Policy: What Developing Countries Need to Know

This paper provides a consolidated, up-to-date overview of the changes to the CAP and the factors making for further reform from the particular perspective of decision-makers in developing countries. It discusses the principles and mechanisms by which EU farmers are supported under the CAP, and the way in which these mechanisms have been changing since the first major reform of the CAP was adopted in 1992. The main pressures for further reform of the CAP are identified, emphasising the political economy of further reform to provide some sense to developing country policy-makers of how these pressures for reform might play out in the future. Taking a horizontal approach, the impact of reform on developing countries of the three main policy instruments – domestic support, border protection and export subsidies – are then discussed, followed by a focus on a few commodities of particular interest to developing countries. The conclusion develops a checklist of factors which developing country policymakers can use to help track the evolution of the debate on CAP reform and its impact on developing countries.

Cap reform: modelling supply response subject to the land set-aside

This paper uses duality theory to develop a model of European Community agriculture. The model is used to investigate the impact of the land set-aside provision of the recent package of reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy. We assume that producers chose output and variable input levels that maximize difference between revenue and variable cost. By including first-order conditions for the allocation of land across its uses, we impose that the observed allocations are profit-maximizing allocations. To overcome the problem of incorporating many outputs into an estimable production structure, we imposed a priori the restriction that the technology was weakly separable in major categories of outputs. With this restriction, it was possible to model production decisions in stages using consistent aggregates in the latter stages.

The Utilisation of EU and US Trade Preferences for Developing Countries in the Agri-Food Sector

We calculate various indicators of the utilisation of preferences granted to developing countries by the EU and the US in the agricultural, food and fisheries sector. We conclude that only a very small proportion of the imports eligible to these preferences is actually exported outside a preferential regime. The rate of utilisation is therefore high. However, the flow of imports from poorest countries remains very limited in spite of rather generous tariff preferences, which leads to question the overall impact of the preferential agreements. In addition, preferential regimes overlap, and in such cases some regimes are systematically preferred to others. We use econometric estimates of the (latent) cost of using a given preference in order to explain why particular regimes are used. We focus on possible explanations, such as the cumulation rules (that restrict the use of materials originating from other countries), fixed administrative costs, and differences in the preferential margin.

Agricultural Trade Liberalisation in the 21st Century: Has It Done the Business?

Based on a novel, detailed, time‐consistent tariff database taking account of import protection developments in the agricultural sector since 2001, we propose a statistical decomposition of the changes in the various types of tariffs. The results show that the multilateral system has played a limited role in trade liberalisation over the period. Many countries have continued to apply much lower tariffs on agricultural products than their WTO ceilings. Moreover, there has been substantial unilateral dismantling of tariffs over the period, so that much of the liberalisation took place outside WTO and regional agreements. The number of regional trade agreements has surged, but their impact on applied agricultural tariffs has been limited. Finally, we investigate the tariffs, trade and production implications for food and agricultural products of two extreme scenarios in the future development of trade negotiations: an ambitious surge of regional agreements and a trade war within the WTO context.