The stalling of the talks in the Doha Round at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva are leading to questions about the value of such a Round for South Africa, and against this setting there is a feeling that the Republic may have gone too far in liberalising its agricultural sector and that perhaps an increase in border tariffs may be justified given the continued global distortions to agriculture.

This paper uses the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) computer model to simulate (a) a likely outcome for agriculture from the Doha Round of the WTO and (b) the impacts for South Africa of raising its tariffs by 25 percentage points across all agricultural sectors. A feature of the analysis is that it uses as a ‘base’ or starting platform for the simulation to assess a possible Doha outcome against a trade picture that includes known global updates. This then enables us to isolate the effects of only the particular scenario in either (a) or (b) being investigated. Following the analysis of part (b) the paper then explores whether South Africa actually has the policy space within its multilateral World Trade Organisation (WTO) commitments and bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) commitments to undertake such a unilateral action. The institutional issue of South Africa undertaking these actions within the mandate of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) Agreement is ignored, although the implications from the model’s output for the wider SACU is explored.

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