Abstract
The WTO and the human rights systems have been created to pursue the same global objective: advancing human welfare. However, while the WTO scheme, including the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), is concerned with aggregated improvements in global welfare, human rights focus on the individual and postulate standards that have to be respected even in the pursuit of overall societal goals. Due to this difference, liberalization of trade in agriculture can have negative impacts on the realization of individual rights, an outcome WTO Members are required to avoid according to human rights law. Focusing specifically on the right to food, this paper suggests four ways of making agricultural trade rules more complementary to that right: by inserting the right explicitly in a new trade agreement, by interpreting existing or future rules to take account of the right, by invoking the right as an exception to a trade obligation and, most importantly, by shaping the revised AoA, which is being negotiated as part of the Doha Round, to conform to the right to food.
Published Version
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