Book Description

Agri-trade has been one of the most ‘managed’ of all the sectors World over. It started with keeping agriculture out of the purview of GATT. Thus while countries were willing to accept a common set of rules for trade in manufacturing, most countries were interested in keeping their autonomy with respect to agricultural trade. Later in 1995, agri-trade was included as one of the areas in the WTO but there was and still is a considerable hesitance in accepting one set of rules for agriculture from a whole lot of countries, whether developed or developing. On the other hand, India for its own reasons had been a reasonably conservative player for long. Just after Independence, it was felt that exposure to the World agri-market has the potential to affect the prices of agricultural products in a negative way. Among most of the economies, India also tried to control agri-trade and in this process, tried keeping external vulnerability of agriculture sector very low. Moreover in India, more than 70% of the total employment occurred in agriculture and hence it was feared that any exposure to trade would Jeopardize the livelihood of so many people. In any case it was not easy to penetrate the market of developed countries’ which were and continue to be fairly protectionist.