Agri-Environment and Rural Development in the Doha Round
Aimed at shedding light on the possible options for developing countries to make use of agrienvironmental and rural development measures within the framework of the WTO, this paper surveys those programs used in the Quad that are considered non or at most minimally trade distorting, non-discriminatory and otherwise consistent with current WTO rules. Furthermore, it tries to illustrate the possible outcomes in the ongoing negotiations in the WTO on the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) from a developing country viewpoint, related to the types of mechanisms surveyed above.
Hereby, the survey focuses on those measures, which have been notified by WTO Members under the so called Green Box (Annex 2 of the AoA) as this is the AoA instrument which allows for unlimited spending on domestic support measures that are not more than minimally tradedistorting. Hereby, the notification practice of WTO Members is serving as a starting point. Nevertheless, due to rather weak transparency and notification requirements, it is difficult to determine whether all notified Green Box measures are really green or not. The major stumbling block here is that there is no definition so far on what is “at most minimally trade distorting.” Such a vague term would need to be defined by WTO dispute settlement panels, but there have been no related cases brought to them yet.
In this survey, special attention is drawn on EU practice as the European trade bloc has established a separate pillar in its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which exclusively deals with rural development and agri-environment. In the case of the EU, the paper looks at the legal framework on RD and agri-environment at the EU level, while further taking four national/regional programs as examples for how Member States have been implementing the EU framework legislation on RD. The other Quad countries are addressed in the sequence (Canada, United States and Japan) as this order best reflects the degree of engagement the individual countries have shown in agriculture-related conservation and rural development policies.