In April 1994, contracting parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), including South Africa, officially signed the Marrakesh Declaration, which established the World Trade Organization (WTO) as an institutional framework for overseeing further trade negotiation rounds and adjudicating trade disputes. The declaration also formalised the successful conclusion of the seven-year Uruguay Round (UR) of multilateral trade negotiations, a Round where agricultural products were comprehensively included for the first time. Subsequently, agricultural trade was subject to less discrimination, though it is still regarded as the poor cousin of trade in industrial or manufactured goods with respect to protection levels.

The ideological view that agriculture is somehow different from other sectors continued despite it being comprehensively brought into the multilateral negotiating environment for the first time. Separate agriculture disciplines were agreed under the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), although the UR did initiate a process to reduce or limit agriculture’s exemptions and bring them more fully under GATT/WTO disciplines.

The objective of this paper is to assess how effective the AoA has been ten years after its implementation. The timing is such that the paper was required to be in final form by the end of November 2005, some two weeks before the Hong Kong Ministerial of the WTO. This Ministerial, following the Cancun and Doha Ministerial, is likely to be a significant milestone. It is not too harsh a statement to make that the WTO cannot survive another Ministerial failure.

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