Challenges Facing the World Trade Organization Negotiations on Agriculture

Abstract

nities, and shed a spotlight on the WTO before it had transformed itself as an organization. The increased role and profile of the developing countries in the WTO represents another challenge for the organization. The WTO (and the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, URAA) was established to address producers' concerns, not consumer concerns. But consumers now drive the global food system. The power of the consumer, and emerging concerns over technology, production processes, and animal welfare, has brought intangibles into an organization ill-equipped to deal with them. The Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement anticipated that safety regulations could be disguised as protectionism. But it did not anticipate the conflict over the definition of sound science and precaution. Nor did it anticipate that the issue under debate would not just be animal and plant health, but human health-a politically potent issue for any national government, much less a disembodied international organization. Nontrade concerns also arise outside the