Agriculture Trade Reform And Poverty Reduction

the group to understand the poverty implication of trade policy reforms."

Trade liberalization tends to boost economic growth and contribute to the reduction of poverty in the longer term but it may also impose important short-term adjustment costs. This study explores the poverty implications of the current post-Doha multilateral trade reform agenda of the WTO for developing countries. It address the implications at three levels: on developing countries as a group; on different types of developing countries; and on different types of households within developing countries. The paper addresses such questions as whether food-importing countries would suffer from higher food prices in international markets, and what impact reform could have on food security and poverty alleviation.

This volume sets out a strategy for raising rural incomes which emphasises the creation of diversified rural economies with opportunities within and outside agriculture.

An estimated 1.2 billion people live on less than one dollar a day, and recent estimates indicate that over 850 million people lack sufficient food for an active healthy life, mostly in rural areas. This FAO report examines the links between agriculture, trade and poverty and considers how international agricultural trade and trade liberalisation affect the world's poor and food-insecure. Topics discussed include: trends and patterns in international agricultural trade, including trade in the least developed countries and within regions, and the role of supermarkets; policy issues including domestic support, export competition and market access; macroeconomic impacts of agricultural trade reforms for poverty reduction and pro-poor development objectives; food insecurity and trade liberalisation measures. The report recommends a twin-track approach which seeks to invest in human capital, institutions and infrastructure to enable the poor to take advantage of trade-related opportunities, while establishing safety nets to protect vulnerable members of society. This publication contains a mini CD-ROM of the "FAO Statistical Yearbook 2004 Vol. 1/1" in Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Spanish.

These conference proceedings explore why policy coherence is important, how it affects global agricultural trade, and whether it can help reduce poverty and hunger.

Agricultural trade liberalization has been resisted by many developing-country policymakers, including those in the Middle East and North Africa, for fear it could hurt domestic farmers and exacerbate poverty. The authors of Trade Liberalization and Poverty in the Middle East and North Africa argue, however, that this concern about liberalization might be misplaced. Drawing on case studies from Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia, the study uses household survey data and computable general equilibrium models to simulate the effects of various liberalization scenarios on different types of households in these countries, especially poor households. The results indicate that agricultural trade barriers are not an effective means of protecting the poor and that the benefits from many forms of agricultural trade liberalization to the region's consumers outweigh the costs to producers. If complemented with other domestic programs-including agricultural research and extension, information services, disease control, and social safety nets-the reforms have the potential to reduce poverty in these nations. The study findings are a valuable resource for policymakers and development specialists evaluating the role trade liberalization can play in economic development and poverty reduction.

This document reviews the literature on the relationship between agricultural trade policy reform and poverty, and the results of recent detailed simulation studies applied to economies in the ESCAP region. It then uses the GTAP model to evaluate the possible impacts of the most recently proposed modality for agricultural trade reform under Doha on the economies of the ESCAP region. It compares the results to a benchmark of comprehensive agricultural trade reform and finds that the current proposal does not imply significant cuts to applied tariffs, and has very modest overall effects on welfare.