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McMahon, Joseph A. --- "Food security and agricultural trade: an early warning for climate change!" [2016] ELECD 1470; in Delimatsis, Panagiotis (ed), "Research Handbook on Climate Change and Trade Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) 256

Book Title: Research Handbook on Climate Change and Trade Law

Editor(s): Delimatsis, Panagiotis

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781783478439

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: Food security and agricultural trade: an early warning for climate change!

Author(s): McMahon, Joseph A.

Number of pages: 23

Abstract/Description:

It is our view that developing countries with large agrarian population need to be provided with certain flexibility within the Agreement. More specifically, such developing countries need to be allowed to provide domestic support in the agricultural sector to meet the challenges of food security and to be able to preserve the viability of rural employment, as different from the trade distortive support and subsidies presently permitted by the Agreement. It is therefore important that a differentiation is made between such domestic support measures which are product-specific and are presently being used to carve out a niche in the international trade and between those measures which are non-product specific and are geared towards improving productivity and reducing the vulnerability of the rural population, because only then would developing countries be able to alleviate rural poverty and address concerns related to food security. This member went on to argue that the Agreement on Agriculture should provide a greater degree of flexibility for developing countries with predominantly rural agrarian economies, for example, by exempting support for maintaining and enhancing domestic production for domestic consumption in food insecure countries from the domestic support reduction commitments, and allowing ‘for appropriate border measures and safeguard mechanisms, as a special and differential provision to minimize the deleterious effect that possible surges of imports could have on food security and rural employment’.