During our meetings today Jason Russell spoke on behalf of the possible term 'agricultural support' as a way to broadly describe a variety of subsidy and trade programs. We will be discussing this item tomorrow and I wanted to share the information he provided.

#1 - From The UN
Agricultural support takes two principle forms: it can be provided in the form of payments, including producer and consumer subsidies, or in form of border measures, including tariff and non-tariff barriers. Tariff barriers are associated with relatively high average tariff rates, relatively high tariff peaks, and tariff escalations. By contrast, nontariff barriers include import quotas, but also overly complex rules of origin and overly stringent sanitary, phytosanitary and technical product standards. As many non-tariff  barriers are difficult to quantify they are not captured in measures of total aggregate support.

#2 - From The World Bank
Support to agricultural producers can be provided through (1) border measures which raise domestic prices and are thus financed by consumers (import tariffs and restrictions), (2) export subsidies, and (3) government subsidies to farmers that are financed by taxpayers.

#3 - From The OECD

........

This type of evidence led to a discussion of possibly using the phrase in the following fashion, "....substantially reduce agricultural support including the elimination of agrilcultural subsidies for the production of one or more of the following..."

Updates - From Jim Lyle

Submitted these through the topic blog but not sure if the posts went thru as I seemed to have received an incomplete email requesting a confirmation that I sent them, so maybe if I sent straight to you that’s better…

 

Not sure where today’s meeting is as I can’t seem to get the stream to work, but…

I want to second Jason’s support for “agricultural support” (or “agricultural support and protection”).  I think additional evidence shows that this is the term of art used to discuss the subject within the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture.  Furthermore, such a term allows for an AFF to access a variety of supports which are necessary to solve trade issues.

 

1. Ag support is: domestic support, market access barriers, and export subsidies

 

Economic Research Service of the USDA 5-21-07

[“WTO: Agreement on Agriculture,” http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/WTO/genuraa.htm]

 

But under the AoA, countries agreed to reduce agricultural support and protection in the areas of market access, domestic support, and export subsidies—sometimes referred to as the "three pillars" of the agreement.

 

2. More evidence

 

Hart and Beghin, 2004

[Rethinking Agricultural Domestic Support under the

World Trade Organization, http://www.card.iastate.edu/publications/DBS/PDFFiles/04bp43.pdf]

 

The Uruguay Round negotiations established the “three pillars” of agricultural support: market access, export subsidies, and domestic support. The market access provisions required, among other things, tariffication; that is, all non-tariff trade barriers had to be replaced by tariffs and bounds were set upon those tariffs. The export subsidy provisions established maximum ceilings on the trade quantity and budgetary expenditures for export subsidies and implemented reductions in those ceilings over time. The domestic support provisions outlined various types of support, classified them by their apparent trade effects, and limited those programs deemed the most trade-distorting.

 

3. the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/14-ag_01_e.htm)

 

Recalling further that "the above-mentioned long-term objective is to provide for substantial progressive reductions in agricultural support and protection sustained over an agreed period of time, resulting in correcting and preventing restrictions and distortions in world agricultural markets";

Committed to achieving specific binding commitments in each of the following areas: market access; domestic support; export competition; and to reaching an agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary issues;

 

(Parts III-V then detail each of the three areas)

 

4. Need all three to prevent “substitution pmn’s”

 

Roberts 03

[Three Pillars of Agricultural Support and Their Impact on

WTO Reforms, www.abareconomics.com/publications_html/trade/trade_03/er03_wtoreform.pdf]

 

The division of agricultural support into three discrete groups of measures — market access, domestic support and export measures — in the present WTO Agreement on Agriculture provides a means of making negotiations more managable. It also ensures that all forms of assistance are accounted for in at least one group. However, in reality, much agricultural support is provided through the interaction of market access, domestic support and export subsidy measures. Market access limitations and, in some conditions, export subsidies are widely used to underpin internal domestic support prices. Under such conditions measures affecting any one of these three discrete groups will affect the others — none of the three is independent of the others. In the final analysis, all support is domestic support in the sense that it is provided to assist a country’s farmers. As well as the three groups of measures being used in interdependent ways, they are substitutable for each other. For example, increased domestic support, such as through subsidies, can be readily used as a substitute for assistance to producers through internal market price support that previously depended on market access barriers and/or export subsidies. That is, market access barriers and/or export subsidies can be reduced but support to producers can be maintained at previous levels by substituting with additional domestic subsidies.

 

5. Need more than domestic supports

 

Anderson 05

[Kym, Why market access is the most important of agriculture’s ‘three pillars’ in the Doha negotiations, Nov, siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRANETTRADE/Resources/239054-1126812419270/WhyMarketAccess.pdf]

 
The above results on the relative importance of market access, domestic support, and export subsidies as sources of global economic costs of agricultural protection are important to understand, because they can influence the weight of effort trade negotiators put into liberalizing the three “pillars”. The intuition behind the model results is straighforward. Agricultural market access barriers are much more important than domestic subsidies because: the amounts of support provided through market access barriers – to agriculture and to processed food – in developed (and even more so in developing) countries are much greater than the supports provided through subsidies; trade barriers distort both production and consumption whereas domestic support only distorts production (and less so the more those measures are decoupled); and market access barriers vary much more across countries and commodities, and hence generate  larger costs, than do domestic support measures. These results point to the importance of ensuring that market access is high on the Doha Development Agenda’s agricultural negotiations.