The biggest gains from Doha Round agricultural negotiations are in tariff reform - an area where the U.S. doesn't have much to offer:
The Doha Round of trade negotiations should accelerate in a few days.
Among other goals, the negotiators want to reduce tariffs on farm products, production subsidies to farmers, and subsidies to farm product exporters.
By far, the world's biggest potential gains come from tariff reductions: Kym Anderson and Will Martin (Agriculture, Trade Reform, and the Doha Agenda ):
...Much of the attention in the negotiations has focused on the abolition of export subsidies, and the framework agreement envisages their complete abolition, and only partial reform of agricultural tariffs. However, extremely high applied tariffs on agricultural relative to non-farm products are the major reasons for food and agricultural policies contributing 62 percent of the welfare cost of current merchandise trade distortions. Subsidies to farm production and exports are only minor additional contributors: 4 and 1 percentage points respectively, compared with 56 points due to agricultural tariffs. This is even truer for developing countries than for developed ones...Panagariya...has pointed to the risk of some developing countries losing from abolition of export subsidies. Disciplining those domestic subsidies and phasing out export subsidies is nonetheless very important, so as to prevent re-instrumentation of assistance from tariffs to domestic subsidies and to bring agriculture into line with non-farm trade in terms of not using export subsidies. (page 12)
The Anderson and Martin essay introduces a new World Bank book, Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda, which they edited.
A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) paper, ”Policies That Distort World Agricultural Trade: Prevalence and Magnitude” , has an overview of trade distorting practices by country. It doesn’t estimate the potential benefits from eliminating them.
Here's a CBO figure on applied agricultural tariffs. U.S. tariffs are low compared to those of other countries. We don't have much to offer here up here in the negotiations, but a lot to ask for (click on the figure to get the blown-up and readable version):
We're a greater offender with respect to producer subsidies. The chart below shows annual rates of domestic support (as a percentage of farm output) in recent years.
The chart distinguishes between "amber box" subsidies, which tend to be more trade distorting, and other subsidies which are believed to distort trade to a lesser extent. Countries are ranked by amber box subsidies rather than total subsidies. Bear in mind that there can be a lot of controversy about whether or not a given subsidy belongs in the amber box or not:
The total value of support is a better index of the total trade distorting impact of a country's subsidies than the support rate. Total U.S. domestic support - averaged over the years 1998-present - is about $71 billion. This is almost a third of the total world average subsidy over the period. Only the E.U., at $87 billion, comes in higher. No other country comes anywhere close.
However, focusing more tightly on amber box support, the U.S. average was $14 billion, compared to a world average of $75 billion, and an E.U. average of $45 billion.
Subsidies to exporters are thought to distort trade more than production subsidies. The Doha Round's July 2004 framework agreement includes a commitment to phase out all forms of export subsidies. We offend much less with respect to export subsidies:
Again, the total value of subsidies is also important. The value of U.S. subsidies is $66 million. U.S. export subsidies are dwarfed by those of Switzerland-Liechtenstein ($257 million), and everybody is dwarfed by the E.U. (about $4 billion). Total world export subsidies are about $4.5 billion.
Remember the Anderson-Martin finding that most welfare gains from agricultural trade liberalization will come from tariff reduction.
While the CBO report has a generous supply of useful statistics, the CBO was unable to obtain complete figures for recent years and warns that the numbers may not reflect the impacts of policy changes in the last two or three years.
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