Joseph Glauber

Public stockholding programs and the WTO

The issue of how support for public stockholding (PSH) programs is calculated and disciplined within the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) has been a point of contention since 2012. PSH was largely uncontroversial during the Doha negotiations, where issues like the Special Safeguard Mechanism, domestic support, and cotton contributed to the collapse of negotiations in 2008 (Blustein 2009; Jones 2010; Margulis 2023). However, members who raised administered prices to keep up with surging market prices in the late 2000s found themselves facing potential challenges, as support levels for PSH programs threatened to exceed domestic support commitments under the AoA. At the Ministerial Conference in Bali in 2013 (MC 9), members agreed to an interim mechanism, which granted a “peace clause” to countries with existing PSH programs, effectively shielding them from challenges regarding compliance with domestic support obligations under the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism. Under the Bali Decision, members agreed to provide data on how the program operated and to ensure that such programs were not trade distorting or would not affect the food security of other WTO members. PSH remains controversial and members failed to reach agreement on a permanent solution at subsequent Ministerials in Nairobi, Buenos Aires and Geneva. More than 10 years later, failure to reach an agreement on PSH continues to block significant progress in overall negotiations.

From farm to ship to fork: The role of maritime insurance in facilitating global food trade

Developments in agriculture and transportation over the last century have shifted global diets from traditional to staple crops, largely concentrating the source of populations’ nutritional and caloric needs to a limited number of producing countries. Three staple crops—rice, corn, and wheat—now provide more than 40 percent of global caloric intake. The remaining dietary needs of populations are in part met by local markets, but the outsourcing of a significant proportion of food production is now a permanent fixture of food security and nutrition in a globalized agricultural marketplace. More than 80 percent of global trade in staple crops and oilseeds relies on a handful of maritime trade routes that, when disrupted, create a chokehold on food supplies.

Book review: Matias E. Margulis, Shadow negotiators: How UN organizations shape the rules of world trade for food security Stanford University Press, 2023