Agricultural Subsidies and the WTO: The Efficacy of Article 6.3 Serious Prejudice Claims

Abstract

The traditionally unique status of agriculture as an exception to an otherwise increasingly liberalized, international trade regime has become a key challenge in defining the future of the World Trade Organization (“WTO”). Domestic agricultural production in the United States has been protected since the New Deal era, and has seen rekindling during various farming crises spanning to the present day. Protectionism in the agricultural sector is often justified by factors that do not resonate with the general scheme of trade in manufactured goods. On political grounds, states desire self-sufficiency in order to avoid become a political subservient to trading partners who control their citizenry’s food supply. The particularly harsh conditions of a free-trade market in agriculture also compels those states to seek price stabilization measures in order to insulate their domestic farmers from volatility in the international markets. As a result of this predilection for preserving domestic agriculture, the sector has been largely exempted from the WTO’s blanket goals for trade liberalization. However, the WTO’s reduction commitments were one of the major achievements of the Uruguay Round.