Agriculture in the Uruguay Round: an Assessment

In this final chapter of the book, the editors draw upon the views and conclusions of the invited contributors in order to present a summary view of the Uruguay Round agricultural negotiations. This emphasises the reasons for slow progress with the negotiations and why the final outcome fell short of what the most ambitious and optimistic advocates of agricultural policy and trade reform had initially hoped for. After a brief introduction, the chapter opens with a section in which the initial positions of the major Uruguay Round participants on the question of agricultural policy and trade reform are compared and contrasted. The next section details the partial convergence of initial positions achieved by the negotiations. A fourth section deals with the conjunction of the GATT negotiations, in their later stages, with growing domestic pressures for agricultural policy reform in a number of developed countries. A fifth section summarises the GATT Secretary-General Dunkel’s draft agreement on agriculture and assesses its impact upon the Uruguay Round negotiations. A sixth section summarises the ‘final sticking points’ which, in mid-1992, appeared to stand in the way of a final UR agreement on agriculture. The chapter closes with an assessment of the UR agricultural negotiations which seeks to identify what was achieved and the lessons learned for the future.