WTO Negotiations and Agricultural Trade Liberalization in Latin America

A new round of WTO negotiations will probably be launched sometime during 2001. In preparation, each WTO member was due to submit negotiation proposals by December 2000. For Latin American countries, the negotiation scenarios stand to be markedly more difficult than those under the Uruguay Round (UR) due to the pressure of domestic lobbying groups who will intensely scrutinize the negotiating agenda. Whereas in the UR negotiations Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries found themselves facing relatively few mandated changes due to the previous period of unilateral liberalization, which in some cases went beyond the GATT/World Trade Organization (WTO) requirements, we can now expect a more active and aggressive participation in the discussions in response to sectoral pressures. This would come specifically from producers of import-competing goods, bound to be the net losers of the liberalization process. This chapter presents an overview of agricultural trade policy issues in the LAC region and attempt to identify the region’s major interests in the forthcoming WTO negotiations. It is relevant to discuss here the relationship between agricultural trade liberalization and food security. Food security is considered by some food-importing countries as one of the non-trade concerns to be taken into account in the new WTO negotiations. Furthermore, in future negotiating statements in the WTO, some governments (primarily from South Asia, Africa and North Africa/Middle East) will argue that further trade liberalization would threaten food security in their countries.