Farm Wars

The Political Economy of Agriculture and the International Trade Regime

Robert Wolfe

The Farm War of the early 1980s was evident in disruptions on the farm and in world markets, in conflicts among major governments, and in disagreements in international organizations. The Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations, ostensibly devoted to the new issues of globalization, dragged on from 1986 to 1993 in an attempt to end farm subsidy battles. Wolfe shows how and why battles over agricultural protectionism were largely resolved through the Round, demonstrating that the global economy is not self-regulating: it needs institutions if it is to be stable. The Green Box, a core provision of the Agreement on Agriculture, shows how states can decide that certain types of policies should be immune from international regulation by the new World Trade Organization, an elegant compromise between the imperatives of responding to global change and maintaining democratic accountability. This analysis will be helpful for planners of the next set of farm trade talks, due to begin in 1999, while the annotated text of the Agreement on Agriculture will be especially useful in introducing students to the complexities of trade policy.

Wolfe's book on the Uruguay Round agricultural negotiations challenges the reader with a blend of policy analysis and insights from the literature on international political economy. He poses perceptive questions about the WTO agreement on agriculture, and answers them with a compelling application of Polanyi's seminal analysis that addresses contemporary problems of agricultural trade policy. Wolfe's experience in government makes his work informative and penetrating.Gilbert R. Winham, Dalhousie University

In Farm Wars Wolfe uses Karl Polanyi's notion of a"double movement" to explain how the recent GATT discussions came to a final position on agriculture both different from and arguably better than what any of the participants ever intended. Colin A.M. Duncan, Queen's University

Wolfe has combined a detailed examination of international regimes and agricultural trade, an interesting application of the concept of embedded liberalism as developed by Ruggie on the basis of Polanyi, and a thorough analysis of the Uruguay Round negotiations. In doing so, he has made a notable contribution to the IPE literature generally and the work on multilateral negotiations in the context of the GATT/WTO in particular. Andrew F. Cooper, University of Waterloo

Farm Wars was published in London and New York by Macmillan and St. Martin's Press in January 1998. The Korean trnslation was published in Seoul by BeeBong in 1999.