This book brings together a collection of papers prepared for the Global Forum on Agriculture which took place at the OECD in December 2014. It reviews current knowledge about agricultural and agricultural trade policy settings and asks how pertinent that knowledge is in the light of profound market and structural changes that have been taking place in the global agro-food sector in recent decades. It aims to inform and assist policy makers and negotiators as they seek to overcome the problems that have made the agricultural pillar of the Doha Agenda trade negotiations particularly difficult. The data and analysis presented cover OECD and major G20 and emerging economies which account for the great bulk of global food production, consumption and trade.

This chapter presents a synthesis of the work presented to the OECD’s 2014 Global Forum on Agriculture: Issues in Agricultural Trade Policy, held in Paris on 2 December 2014. It first provides an overview of the main developments in agricultural markets that have occurred since the Doha round of negotiations began in 2001. Second, significant policy developments in OECD and other major agricultural producing countries are briefly discussed. Third, the relevance of the lessons from past OECD reviews of agricultural policies in the context of market and policy changes is explored. The chapter concludes by analysing why agricultural market liberalisation remains an important tool for continued sector growth, rural development and food security.

This chapter looks at how the conditions and policies for global agriculture have changed since the major international agreements of 2008, how work done in OECD up to 2008 may be relevant to current negotiations, and where new analyses may be needed. Section 2 looks at developments in international markets for agricultural products. The evolution of the policy landscape is considered in Section 3, as well as how it relates to commitments under the Agreement on Agriculture and potential future commitments along the lines agreed in 2008 for the Doha Development Agenda (DDA). Section 4 reviews relevant OECD work on market and trade impacts of agricultural policies, while implications for achieving optimal policy performance are briefly summarised in Section 5. Some possible implications for the post-Bali negotiations on agriculture are suggested in Section 6. A few issues that might benefit from future analysis are proposed in Section 7.

This chapter considers what is allowed or required under the rules and commitments of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) of the WTO and what could be allowed or required under the rules and commitments of an agreement corresponding to the draft modalities arrived at in 2008 under the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) of the WTO. The chapter also discusses some issues not addressed in the AoA or the draft modalities but which have come to the fore in the years since, such as at the 2013 WTO Ministerial conference. The purpose is to help to assess the pertinence of the draft modalities for the continued negotiations in agriculture.

This chapter reviews the literature on the recent performance of stockholding policies that influence prices. The first section provides definitions of the different types of stock, according to their primary purpose, focusing especially on buffer stocks and social safety net stocks. The next section identifies which variables will be used to examine the performance of these two types of stocks and addresses some of the general issues that are known to influence their performance. Then, the effectiveness of buffer stocks and social safety net stocks is reviewed using recent country case experiences. The fourth section describes the distributional and fiscal impacts of these types of stocks, as well as their effect on the private sector and international spillovers. The last section concludes.