Agricultural policy reform under the Uruguay Round: impact on Asian-Pacific developing countries

It has taken until the Uruguay Round for agriculture to be brought under the discipline of the GATT rules-based trading system. This paper first examines the extent to which the Round's Agreement on Agriculture provides the necessary discipline on farm policies, what reform implementation progress has been made to date, and what problems remain for the next Round of negotiations. It notes that the new rules for agriculture are far from ideal, and the extent of reform commitment is quite minor for the rest of this decade, but at least a start has been made. An important conclusion for net food-importing developing countries is that they need not fear a GATT-induced increase in the price of their food imports; on the contrary, any food price rise that might occur because of the Round's implementation will be so small as to be indistinguishable amidst the many other economic forces at work in international commodity and foreign exchange markets