Agricultural Protectionism

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Economics - International Economic Relations, grade: 1,3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, language: English, abstract: Today we live in a globalized world and anybody can buy any product from any country in the world. But that is not completely true. Trade is not as free as many of us always think it is. There are still so many trade barriers which make international trade sometimes such an adventure. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was established to liberalize trade by reducing or eliminating tariffs and any other trade barriers. Therefore, all members have to contribute to that undertaking and make concessions. In the current round, named the Doha Development Agenda this does not work as it was meant to. A crucial issue in that conflict is agriculture. Developing countries and least developed countries complain about large amounts of subsidies paid by high-income countries such as the EU. In contrast, developed countries want developing countries to make concessions in terms of trade related intellectual property rights and trade related investment measures. So each country blames the other one instead of taking action and making the first step. This essay is structured into two main parts. The first part informs about some basics of protectionism and what happened so far in terms of agricultural liberalization. Chapter two gives a short overview of the existing types of protectionist measures to get a f...