An agri-environmental assessment of trade liberalization

Abstract

This paper assesses the potential agri-environmental impacts on the United States of liberalizing world agricultural trade. We examine how the elimination of all agricultural policy distortions in all trading countries might influence agricultural production decisions and subsequently affect environmental quality in the United States. The estimated changes in U.S. agricultural production under the ambitious assumption of full agricultural trade liberalization are well within the bounds of average annual variation for agricultural commodity production (Fig. 2). In this context, our results suggest that, for the United States as a whole, environmental impacts stemming from such hypothesized trade shocks would also fall within the average annual variation. This generalization aside, we note that the estimated changes in commodity production and subsequent environmental impacts are not uniform across the landscape, with increases in agricultural production and the environmental indicators in some regions or sectors and decreases in others.