New Vision for Global Agriculture--U.S. Proposal for Global Agricultural Trade Reform

U.S. Proposal for Global Agricultural Trade Reform

A New Vision for
Global Agriculture

LEVEL…the playing field
ELIMINATE…barriers

GROW…markets

The Bush Administration has unveiled a bold, ambitious, comprehensive package of reforms for global agriculture.
Good for Americans:
- With 95 percent of the world’s population living outside the United States, our farmers and ranchers rely on international trade to sell their surplus.
- Dollar for dollar, we export more wheat than coal, more fruits and vegetables than household appliances, more meat than motorcycles, more corn than cosmetics, and more bakery products than motorboats.
- Overall, one in three U.S. farm acres is planted for export, and 27 percent of farm cash receipts comes from exports.
- Farm exports mean more American jobs. In 2004, $62.4 billion in foreign sales resulted in a total economic impact of $162 billion and generated more than 1 million jobs.
- Liberalized agriculture means lower prices and more choices for all Americans.
Good for World Markets:
- Open markets have spurred global prosperity for the past five decades, but high barriers have prevented agriculture from being a full participant.
- Removing barriers to agricultural trade would increase exports from developed and developing countries by nearly 30 percent and would raise global welfare.
- Developing countries, which cannot afford high subsidies and which are hampered by tariffs on their exports, will be especially well-served by our proposal.
Principles of Reform:
- The United States proposal rests on three principles: 1) Leveling the playing field, 2) Working toward eliminating barriers to trade, and 3) Growing the market.
- We propose scrapping all export subsidies over five years.
- We are calling for a drastic reduction in average allowed farm tariffs, from 62 to 15 percent.
- We propose reducing the ceiling on trade-distorting subsidies by over $100 billion through setting a cap of no more than 5 percent of total agricultural production.
- In the near term, these steps will reduce the wide inequities that exist between countries in agricultural market openness.
- We envision the eventual elimination of all agricultural trade barriers.
This proposal follows through on our WTO commitments
- U.S. leadership on trade is critical to keeping up the momentum we established last November in Doha.
- Progress on agriculture is the key to successful overall negotiations in the WTO, so the momentum created by our agriculture proposal will be carried to all areas of the ongoing talks.
We welcome other countries stepping forward to join us in liberalizing global agricultural trade.

Main Page: U.S. Proposal for Global Agricultural Trade Reform

Background on the current round of WTO negotiations

Last modified: Friday, November 18, 2005