Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
tions family of international organizations, the putative ITO was abandoned in 1948
following objections from the US Congress. Nevertheless, the GATT, drawn up by
a small cadre of 15 countries, and with a limited scope and purpose, lived on until
1994.
The eventual demise of the GATT regime was instigated by the decision to com-
mence multilateral trade talks in Punta del Este, in Uruguay, in 1986. The Uruguay
Round, as it became known, involved a series of wide-ranging negotiations whih
focused on the alleged shortcomings of the GATT system. For the purposes of this
hapter, there were two key shortcomings identified. The first of these related to the
issue of discipline and enforceability. The GATT was a loose, treaty-based regime
without a robust and permanent system for dispute setlement. As suh, its viabil-
ity depended on members' commitments to abide by its provisions. As the GATT's
membership steadily grew, and international trade increased in volume and com-
plexity, the problem of membership commitment and enforceability became increas-
ingly vexed. Thus, by the mid-1980s, there was consensus amongst trade policy elites
for a replacement multilateral regime, based around a permanent institution with
powers to enforce decisions on members - in other words, a return to the origin-
al 1947 conception of an ITO. The second key issue related to agriculture. This sec-
tor was excluded from the GATT's core provisions, largely on account of US do-
mestic policy concerns in the late 1940s. During the GATT era, therefore, interna-
tional agricultural trade negotiations tended to take place via purpose-specific 'side-
agreements' (the International Dairy Agreement, the Bovine Meat Agreement, etc.),
generally involving limited numbers of the GATT membership. Suh arrangements
clearly fostered institutional complexity in the international trading system: wheth-
er a country was a signatory, or not, to any Agreement determined its behaviour on
world markets. Non-signatories could episodically dump product into others' mar-
kets with no effective sanction, thus injecting considerable uncertainty and unpre-
dictability into international trade. Moreover, the disjointed nature of this system
meant that agendas to reform agricultural trade had litle traction, as there was no
single forum for discussion of sector-wide issues. During and following the course
of the Uruguay Round, the argument for the inclusion of agriculture into the core
body of a single multilateral trade system was pursued with vigour by a coalition of
agricultural export nations called the Cairns Group, haired by Australia.
The seven years of Uruguay Round negotiations culminated in a decision to re-
place the GATT with the WTO. This created a single institutional entity, not only
