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Agricultural production is strongly affected by and a major contributor to climate change. Agriculture and land-use change account for a quarter of total global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). Agriculture receives around US$600 billion per year worldwide in government support. No rigorous quantification of the impact of this support on GHG emissions has been available. This article helps fill the void. Here, we find that, while over the years the government support has incentivized the development of high-emission farming systems, at present, the support only has a small impact in terms of inducing additional global GHG emissions from agricultural production; partly because support is not systematically biased towards high-emission products, and partly because support generated by trade protection reduces demand for some high-emission products by raising their consumer prices. Substantially reducing GHG emissions from agriculture while safeguarding food security requires a more comprehensive revamping of existing support to agriculture and food consumption. Agricultural sectors receive US$600 billion per year in government support, providing incentives for GHG emission-intensive production. Here, the authors show that removing this support will not reduce global GHG emissions by much; rather it will need to be radically redirected to contribute to climate change mitigation.

The aim of this article is to assess the impact of the European Union's trade preferences on bilateral trade flows. Using highly disaggregated 8-digit import data in a theoretically grounded gravity model framework, we define an explicit measure of preferential tariff margins and use that to estimate sector-specific elasticities. From the methodological point of view, we show that the assessment of these policies' impacts is very sensitive to the definition of the preferential tariff margin. An important by-product of our procedures is that they can be used to obtain estimates of trade elasticities of substitution, some of the most important parameters in the international trade empirical literature. Results show that actual preferential schemes or possible future policies, such as the transatlantic trade agreement between the USA and the EU (TTIP), have a significant impact on trade volumes, with large differences across sectors.

This paper aims to assess the rationales for export taxes in the context of a food crisis. First, we summarize the effects of export taxes using both partial and general equilibrium theoretical models. When large countries aim to maintain constant domestic food prices, in the event of an increase in world agricultural prices, the optimal response is to decrease import tariffs in net food-importing countries and to increase export tariffs in net food-exporting countries. The latter decision improves national welfare, while the former reduces national welfare: this is the price that must be paid to keep domestic food prices constant. Small net foodimporting countries are harmed by both decisions, while small net food-exporting countries gain from both. Second, we illustrate the costs of a lack of regulation and cooperation surrounding such policies in a time of crisis using a global computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, mimicking the mechanisms that appeared during the recent food price surge (2006-2008). This model illustrates the interdependence of trade policies, as well as how a process of retaliation and counter-retaliation (increased export taxes in large net food-exporting countries and reduced import tariffs in large net food-importing countries) can contribute to successive augmentations of world agricultural prices and harm small net food-importing countries. We conclude with a call for international regulation, in particular because small net food-importing countries may be substantially harmed by those policies that amplify the already negative impact of a food crisis.

Governments, donors and others must step up to protect current and future generations from the devastating effects of malnutrition, as well as to prevent acute food insecurity. Governments, donors and others must step up to protect current and future generations from the devastating effects of malnutrition, as well as to prevent acute food insecurity.

Argentina's G20 presidency has emphasized the need to improve soil management and sustainably increase agricultural productivity to achieve an inclusive and resilient food future. While increased agricultural productivity can improve economic welfare and help address food security problems by benefiting both consumers and producers simultaneously, it also must address the depletion of already scarce natural resources. In the context of a changing climate, sustainable and resilient agricultural production forms a major cornerstone of both adaptation and mitigation strategies. The global community needs to have the proper tools with which to monitor sustainable agricultural productivity gains, identify countries and sectors lagging behind, and commit R&D efforts accordingly to address the challenges ahead. As such, it is suggested that 1) an international consortium should monitor agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) to provide international comparisons and track performance over time; 2) the G20 should acknowledge and address the issue of sustainable productivity measurement, and; 3) the G20 should support more in-depth research into the relationship between agricultural TFP and agricultural R&D.

This paper reviews the literature on the measurement and characterization of trade integration in Africa. We offer the complete evaluation of available indicators and methodologies. The indicators include those that have recently emerged from network analysis like indicators of trade in value-added commodities. It is concluded that Africa is characterized by weak trade integration, particularly with the rest of the world. This is naturally explained by high trading costs that are evaluated by tariffs, non-tariff measures, and other trade costs, such as those related to border and documentary compliance. The region's small number of trading partners and low product diversification are also noticeable. However, the use of more refined indicators shows that intra-African trade is relatively high when compared with trade with other continents, contrary to what can be concluded from some simple trade share indicators.

This study offers new conclusions on the economic cost of a failed Doha Development Agenda (DDA). We assess potential outcome of the Doha Round as well as four protectionist scenarios using the MIRAGE Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. In a scenario where applied tariffs of World Trade Organization (WTO) economies would go up to currently bound tariff rates, world trade would decrease by 9.9% and world welfare by US$353 billion. The economic cost of a failed DDA is here evaluated by the difference between a cooperative scenario (DDA) and a protectionist one (US$412 billion in terms of welfare). Another point of view is to compare a resort to protectionism when the DDA is implemented with a resort to protectionism when the DDA is not implemented. The findings show that this trade agreement could prevent the potential reduction of US$809 billion of trade and, therefore, acts as an efficient multilateral ‘preventive’ scheme against the adverse consequences of trade ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ policies.

This survey concludes that including agriculture in the negotiations was particularly important economically. Although agricultural exports are less than 10% of merchandise trade, the high and variable protection in this sector appears to account for the majority of the cost of distortions in global merchandise trade. Within agriculture, most of the costs appear to arise from trade barriers levied on imports, because these barriers tend to be high and variable across products and over time and are levied by many countries that do not use subsidies. The diverse interests of participants resulted in very complex proposals and a tendency for countries to focus on the political costs of an agreement, rather than on the potential economic benefits. The negotiations faced a need for balance between discipline in reducing tariffs and flexibility in managing political pressures. Although the approach of providing flexibilities on a certain percentage of tariff lines is seriously flawed, the proposed modalities still appear to provide worthwhile market access. There need to be better ways of dealing with developing countries' concerns about food price volatility while reducing the collective-action problems resulting from price insulation.

This paper uses detailed data on bound and applied tariffs to assess the consequences of the WTO's December 2008 Modalities for tariffs levied and faced by developing countries, and the welfare implications of these reforms. We find that the tiered formula for agriculture would halve tariffs in industrial countries and lower them more modestly in developing countries. In non-agricultural market access (NAMA), the formulas would reduce the tariff peaks facing developing countries and cut average industrial country tariffs by more than a third. We use a political-economy framework to assess the implications of flexibilities for the size of the tariff cuts and find they are likely to substantially reduce the outcome. However, despite the flexibilities, there are likely to be worthwhile gains, with applied tariffs facing developing countries cut by about 20% in agriculture and 28% in NAMA, and sizeable cuts in tariffs facing industrial countries. The welfare impacts of reform are evaluated using a new approach to aggregation that improves on the traditional, flawed approach of weighted-average tariffs. This substantially increases the estimated benefits of an agreement along the lines of these modalities, with estimated global income gains of up to $160 billion per year from market access reform.

Differential Export Tax (DET) rates, or the policy of imposing high export taxes on raw commodities and low export taxes on processed goods, generate public revenues and promote production at the more processed stages of a value chain. We study the theoretical justification of this trade policy by designing a simple international trade model which shows that a tax on exports of a raw agricultural commodity in a country that exports seeds and vegetable oils increases the sum of final consumers' surplus, processing sector profits, farmers' surplus, and public revenues. We then develop a partial equilibrium model of the world's oilseed value chain and simulate the total elimination of DETs in Argentina and Indonesia, as well as the independent removal of export taxes at various stages of production in the same countries. Estimations show that removing export taxes along the entire value chain in Argentina and Indonesia reduces the local production of biofuels by only 0.4% in Argentina, while eliminating only the export tax on biofuels in Argentina leads to a 9.6% volume increase in Argentinean biofuels production.