1 The Agreement on Agriculture: setting the

scene
Joseph A. McMahon and Melaku Geboye Desta
I. INTRODUCTION
This volume brings together views and analyses by leading scholars
and practitioners around the world on some of the most pressing issues
of international agricultural trade law, policy and regulation, including
the implication of national and international trade policies on national
food security, global climate change, and biotechnology. While the
WTO system occupies a central role in all matters of agricultural
production and trade policy, many of these new challenges remain on
the fringes of the WTOsystem. In this introductory chapter we provide
an overview of the WTO system as it applies to agricultural trade, with
the object of putting the new and emerging issues into their broader
analytical and conceptual context.
The Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) marked a
systemic shift in the international regulation of agricultural production
and trade. The AoA put an end to an era of exceptionalism in which
agriculture was excluded fromkey principles of the General Agreement
on Taris and Trade (GATT), particularly those on quantitative
import restrictions under Article XI and export subsidies under Section
B of Article XVI, while the remaining parts of the GATT were largely
ignored by the major contracting parties. The AoA has now brought
this to an end. But even the AoAdoes not subject agricultural products
to the same rules as other products. Indeed, we have the AoA as a
sector-specic agreement precisely because members of the WTO are
not yet ready to treat agriculture in the same way as other products. In
the words of the Preamble, the AoA aims only to establish a basis for
initiating a process of reform of trade in agriculture, while the long-
termobjective of that process is to establish a fair and market-oriented
agricultural trading system.
With these short- and long-term objectives in view, the AoA has: (1)
dened what agricultural products are i.e. all products listed in
Chapters 1 to 24 of the Harmonised System except sh and sh
products, plus certain other specied items;
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and (2) established a
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