Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Foreword by E. THOMAS SULLIVAN
- Introduction: An overview of the volume
- Part I The constitutional developments of international trade law
- Part II The scope of international trade law: Adding new subjects and restructuring old ones
- 6 What subjects are suitable for WTO agreement?
- Comment: We have met the enemy and he is us
- 7 International action on bribery and corruption: Why the dog didn't bark in the WTO
- Comment: It's elementary, my dear Abbott
- 8 Alternative national merger standards and the prospects for international cooperation
- Comment: Harmonizing global merger standards
- 9 Agriculture on the way to firm international trading rules
- Part III Legal relations between developed and developing countries
- Part IV The operation of the WTO dispute settlement procedure
- Bibliography of works by ROBERT E. HUDEC
- Index
- References
9 - Agriculture on the way to firm international trading rules
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Foreword by E. THOMAS SULLIVAN
- Introduction: An overview of the volume
- Part I The constitutional developments of international trade law
- Part II The scope of international trade law: Adding new subjects and restructuring old ones
- 6 What subjects are suitable for WTO agreement?
- Comment: We have met the enemy and he is us
- 7 International action on bribery and corruption: Why the dog didn't bark in the WTO
- Comment: It's elementary, my dear Abbott
- 8 Alternative national merger standards and the prospects for international cooperation
- Comment: Harmonizing global merger standards
- 9 Agriculture on the way to firm international trading rules
- Part III Legal relations between developed and developing countries
- Part IV The operation of the WTO dispute settlement procedure
- Bibliography of works by ROBERT E. HUDEC
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
There are probably few areas in world trade where the proposition that international trade law is a matter of political economy – as reflected in the theme of this book – is so notoriously obvious as in agriculture. And there are certainly few, if any, other papers that describe and analyze the political economy of international trade law for agriculture as sagaciously and convincingly as Bob Hudec's 1998 paper for the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium (Hudec 1998). Whole generations of agricultural specialists, the present author included, have written hundreds of papers and books about the treatment of agriculture in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Hudec, for whom agricultural trade law and policy is but one of the many areas he has covered in his research, needs no more than a few pages to explain in peerless clarity and profound technical competence the interplay between political economy and international law in the agricultural morass that plagued the GATT for a long time.
A few citations may suffice to highlight the way Hudec characterizes the situation of agriculture in the GATT before the Uruguay Round. He starts by noting that “according to conventional wisdom, the original GATT agreement, which lasted from 1947 to the end of 1994, was highly successful in reducing barriers to international trade in industrial goods, but it was a conspicuous failure in reducing barriers and other distortions to trade in agricultural products.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Political Economy of International Trade LawEssays in Honor of Robert E. Hudec, pp. 254 - 282Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
References
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