With a particular focus on developing economies, this book explores the intersection between agri-environmental policy, food policy, agricultural trade policy, and sustainable development. This book explores the many factors which shape sustainable development policies in agriculture. On the production side, using environmentally friendly inputs and good agricultural practices to protect the land and other related resources are necessary conditions for sustainable agriculture. On the other hand, ensuring food safety, security, and sustainable consumption are necessary elements of sustainable food policies and development. In addition, as the agricultural sector grows in an economy, energy needs become a major issue, especially for countries that depend on import. This book explores how these elements are balanced – along with global factors such as foreign direct investment, international climate change provisions, and the role of the WTO – in domains such as value chains, biotechnology, gender equality, ecology, and trade-environment interaction. This book will be of great interest to advanced readers in the fields of agricultural policy, food trade policy, and sustainable development.
The Economics of Sustainable Food details the true cost of food for people and the planet. It illustrates how to transform our broken system, alleviating its severe financial and human burden. The key is smart macroeconomic policy that moves us toward methods that protect the environment like regenerative land and sea farming, low-impact urban farming, and alternative protein farming, and toward healthy diets. The book's multidisciplinary team of authors lay out detailed fiscal and trade policies, as well as structural reforms, to achieve those goals. Chapters discuss strategies to make food production sustainable, nutritious, and fair, ranging from taxes and spending to education, labor market, health care, and pension reforms, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. The authors carefully consider the different needs of more and less advanced economies, balancing economic development and sustainability goals. Case studies showcase successful strategies from around the world, such as taxing foods with a high carbon footprint, financing ecosystems mapping and conservation to meet scientific targets for healthy biomes permanency, subsidizing sustainable land and sea farming, reforming health systems to move away from sick care to preventive, nutrition-based care, and providing schools with matching funds to purchase local organic produce.--Amazon.
With trade recognized as a means of implementation under Agenda 2030, policy-makers will need to ensure that trade, and policies affecting trade and markets, are taken into consideration as part of their efforts to achieve SDG 2. The five targets that set out the level and ambition of SDG 2 (ending hunger; ending all forms of malnutrition; doubling the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers; ensuring sustainable food production systems; and maintaining genetic diversity), as well as trade itself, often constitute distinct policy priorities for governments. Trade and related policy measures that may be designed to achieve one target can potentially have unintended negative consequences that undermine the achievement of other targets, both within the country where the measure is applied and in the trading partner countries. It is therefore important that policy-makers identify and recognize areas in which difficult tradeoffs may be needed between competing policy objectives, and identify possible ways in which these can be addressed. Furthermore, while the different targets set out under SDG 2 are mutually interdependent and inter-related, it is important to address the trade policy dimension of each component individually as part of a broader plan of action.
This timely book provides an accessible insight into how the concept of sustainable development can be made operational through its translation into legal terms. Understood as a multidimensional legal principle, sustainable development facilitates coherent international law making. Using this notion as an analytical lens on the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, the book considers the unresolved question of what a sustainable and coherent agricultural trade agreement could look like.
Despite the Doha declaration of November 2001, the failure to start a new round of global trade negotiations at Seattle in December 1999 and the hostility of protesters to the trade liberalization process and growing global economic and social disparities was a wake-up call for the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The ambitious goal of this ground-breaking book is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of liberalized world trade, in particular in the agricultural sector, and to investigate to what extent the current WTO agreements provide the necessary fail-safe devices to react to trade-related negative impacts on sustainability, environmental protection and food security. The background and interrelationship between the WTO, the tenets of sustainable development and the unique features of the agriculture and forestry sectors are explored, and conclusions regarding the deficits of the world trade system and its conflicts with basic societal goals – such as sustainability – are drawn. Agriculture and forestry have a particular affinity with what the authors call "strong sustainability" and are to be among the major agenda items in forthcoming WTO negotiations. The book proposes that sustainable agricultural production techniques such as integrated and organic farming provide a series of related services to community and environment which could be severely prejudiced by wholesale trade liberalization and the imposition of the large-scale production methods of the mega-trade giants of the USA and Europe. And yet the concept of sustainability is referred to only tangentially in the existing WTO agenda. The WTO, Agriculture and Sustainable Development argues that, without a formal recognition of this failing, the premise that free trade is inherently advantageous for all countries is a falsehood. Further, unfettered liberalization is unsustainable and a social and environmental multilateral framework must be agreed to reinterpret or adapt a host of WTO regulations that are at odds with sustainable development. The core problem is that, under the current system, import duties can only be differentiated by direct goods and services and not by their means of production – sustainable or otherwise. Therefore, a range of environmental policy measures in the agricultural sector, such as the consideration of product life-cycles, the internalization of external costs and a coupling of trade liberalization with ecological obligations are proposed by the authors. In addition, they argue that unsustainable economic short-termism must be curbed and the use of the stick of trade sanctions and the carrot of financial benefits for good environmental performance be permitted to promote sustainable agricultural practices. This book will contribute greatly in addressing the lack of basic theoretical arguments at the intersection between trade and sustainable development – a failing that has already been bemoaned by trade policy-makers. It is highly recommended reading for all those involved or interested in the WTO negotiations, whether from multilateral organizations, governments, industry or civil society.
The Global Food Policy Report is IFPRI’s flagship publication. This year’s annual report examines major food policy issues, global and regional developments, and commitments made in 2015, and presents data on key food policy indicators. The report also proposes key policy options for 2016 and beyond to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In 2015, the global community made major commitments on sustainable development and climate change. The global food system lies at the heart of these commitments—and we will only be able to meet the new goals if we work to transform our food system to be more inclusive, climate-smart, sustainable, efficient, nutrition- and health-driven, and business-friendly.
The process of food production and distribution has grown into a global corporate system in recent years. This has caused significant impacts on sustainability on an international scale, particularly for developing nations. Establishing Food Security and Alternatives to International Trade in Emerging Economies is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on agricultural trade relations and trade liberalization in the context of developing countries. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as crop productivity, rural development, and value-added agriculture, this book is ideally designed for academics, researchers, graduate students, and practitioners interested in the current state of global food markets.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015, are expected to chart a course for development over the next 15 years. The 17 SDGs cover poverty, health, sustainable development, and the environment, among others, but not trade. This book shows that international trade can contribute to achieving all SDGs. It maps out a triple-win scenario where good trade policy (i) spurs international trade, (ii) contributes to development, and (iii) helps achieve the SDGs.
The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2022 (SOCO 2022) discusses how trade policies, based on both multilateral and regional approaches, can address today’s challenges for sustainable development. Trade policies in food and agriculture should aim to safeguard global food security, address the trade-offs between economic and environmental objectives, and strengthen the resilience of the global agrifood system to shocks, such as conflicts, pandemics and extreme weather. The report discusses the geography of trade, analysing food and agricultural trade and its patterns across countries and regions, its drivers and the trade policy environment. Comparative advantage, trade policies and trade costs shape the patterns of trade in food and agriculture. When comparative advantage plays out in the global market, trade benefits all countries. Lowering tariff barriers and reducing trade costs can promote trade and economic growth. Both multilateral and regional trade agreements can facilitate the process of making trade an avenue for growth but the gains of trade are distributed unevenly. When global environmental impacts, such as climate change, are considered, a multilateral approach to trade can help expand the reach of mitigation measures.
