Liberalization Of Agricultural Products Trade And Limitations Of WTO Coordination Mechanism

Agriculture, as the basic industry in one country's national economy, concerns aseries of important issues, such as the people's existence, society's stability,economy's sustainable development, etc. Therefore, agriculture has always been thefocus of protective policies of various governments. However, protection ofagriculture has distorted the international agricultural products trade severely and hadmade all countries suffered a lot from it. Accordingly, the abolishment of tradeprotection had been the voices of most countries in the world. Finally, after decades ofefforts, member countries of WTO came into agreement and signed AgricultureAgreement that has been the foundation of liberalization of agricultural products tradein the Uruguay Round negotiation. Since Agriculture Agreement came into effect in Jan1, 1995, the liberalizationprocess of agricultural products trade has gone through 10 years. During this period,various countries performed their promises according to Agriculture Agreement andhave promoted the liberalization process of agricultural products trade. At the sametime, there are numerous undercurrents in the liberalization process, too. With thebeginning of a new round of agriculture negotiation, contradictions and interestconflicts between various countries appear and have showed the tendency to sharpenonce again. Part One: retrospect of liberalization process of agricultural products trade Ⅰ．Liberalization process of agricultural products trade We can divide the liberalization process of agricultural products trade into twostages taking the subscription of Agriculture Agreement as the boundary. ⅰ．Liberalization of agricultural products trade before the Uruguay Roundnegotiation Protectionism has a long history in agricultural products trade. The earliestprotective agriculture bill can trace back to The Great Britain even more than 100years ago. Various countries have strengthened their protection of agriculture since the20th century came. After World WarⅡ, a lot of governments came to value how toincrease domestic agriculture production in order to secure self-supply. Manycountries especially some developed counties relied on support of agriculturalproducts' market price administratively to secure the sale of domestic agriculturalproducts and increased barriers of market access. The subscription of GeneralAgreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947 opened the gate of liberalization of theinternational trade. As was stipulated in Term11 of GATT, temporary quantitativerestraint on export and import of agricultural products would be allowed as an - 41 -exception on condition that the production in agricultural products was restrained.However, most agricultural products can be classified into primary products, soagricultural products trade was almost excluded from the restraint of the legal systemof GATT. ⅱ．Liberalization of agricultural products trade after the Uruguay Roundnegotiation In 1986, GATT started the Uruguay Round negotiation in which issue of theagricultural products trade was taken as the central one. So far, the multilateralnegotiation of the agricultural products trade raised its curtain. After hard negotiations,various parties finally sign The Agriculture Agreement of Uruguay Round namely TheAgriculture Agreement on Dec5, 1993. The Agriculture Agreement was the milestonein the way of liberalization of the international agricultural products trade. It alsoindicated that the agricultural products trade that had been excluded from the rules ofinternational multilateral trade nearly half a century was back to the legal system ofthe multilateral trade. Since then, the agricultural products trade had its primaryschedule, too. The performance of Agriculture Agreement has been nearly 10 years upto now. The performance period of developed countries has expired for some time andthat of developing countries is also to be over at the...