The Foreign Service Journal, May 2009

M A Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 anization, improved crops and other production-improving technology, the number of farms fell by 71 per- cent, to a little more than two million, by 2007. Unsurprisingly, rural communities have become less dependent on agri- culture. In 1950, almost a third of rural employment came from pro- duction agriculture, giving it an im- portant connection to public policy. Now farms are bigger and rural residents depend heavily on off-farm income. At the moment, only 14 percent of the rural work force is employed in farming, and 900,000 American farmers do other work at least 200 days a year. The average U.S. farmer is 57 — and getting older. The political system is also slowly tilting away from agri- culture. Although the structure of the Senate helps be- cause many members come from farm states, the de- creasing rural dependence on farming may eventually cause Congress to lose interest in the issue. This risk is in- creased because many key farm-state senators such as Richard Lugar, R-Ind., Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., are not young. After this generation retires, their replacements may not have the same connection to farming. Rising non-trade concerns. Agriculture is unique because of its connections to food, rural life and the envi- ronment. These also tie agricultural trade to climate change, energy, food safety and conservation issues. The rise of non-trade concerns about agriculture stems partially from the efforts of nongovernmental organizations that have been able to use the Internet and other channels to organize, raise funds and influence the policy process. Regulatory failures in food safety have also increased these concerns. Supporters of multifunctionality insist that agriculture deserves special support because it has a unique role to play in conservation and food production. If oil prices rise again, the diversion of cropland from food to energy could further complicate trade. Finally, growing climate change concerns have fueled interest in everything from alterna- tive energy to locally produced products. These changes sometimes work against trade, even though the evidence does not support such an association. For example, the food safety issue is used to create suspi- cion of genetically engineered products even though such foods have an outstanding safety record. Since their introduction in 1996, genetically engineered food- stuffs have caused no reliably docu- mented safety problems. Eating local food also may not help climate change. Even if food is grown nearby, it might use more en- ergy than a product grown more ef- ficiently and shipped from its native environs. (An extreme illustration of this would be growing coconut palms in Chicago.) These concerns make it increasingly difficult to enforce and sup- port World Trade Organization standards and could allow governments to back away from their trade commitments. The near-death of Doha. Prospects look grim for the current Doha Round negotiations, launched with great fanfare in 2001 to deepen global trade. Unfortunately, the process has broken down repeatedly, mostly because of agriculture, and has been stalled since July 2008. The biggest differences have arisen over farm production sub- sidies in wealthy countries, and protection for vulnerable products in developing countries. The WTO faces another risk: that countries will accept the penalties rather than play by the rules, undermining confidence in the system. For instance, the European Union has refused to accept WTO dispute-settlement rul- ings on genetically engineered products and beef hor- mones, even at the cost of additional tariffs from the United States. And if U.S. exporters cannot get relief from the WTO, it could cause them to stop supporting the mul- tilateral process. The refusal of some countries to change WTO-incon- sistent rules increases the risk of outright non-compliance with the organization’s dispute-settlement decisions, po- tentially rendering the WTO irrelevant. This risk is espe- cially high if a dispute-settlement ruling has serious political or economic consequences. And if the organiza- tion were to become ineffective, that could lead to a world of hard-to-implement, overlapping trade agreements, fewer predictable rules and higher trade barriers — with no central authority to help manage these arrangements. To make matters worse, many of the U.S.’s most formi- dable competitors are actively engaged in concluding a large number of free trade agreements. Since these vastly outnumber the few FTAs the United States has in place, we risk being left out. For example, while the U.S.-South F O C U S Political challenges to agricultural trade threaten to undermine long-term support for further trade liberalization.