An Analysis On Agricultural Negotiations In Multilateral Trading System Through A Political Economy Approach

Agricultural negotiation has been the focus of controversy in WTO multilateral trade negotiations. It also belongs to "politically sensitive" topic for discussion. In the era of GATT, it was only in the last of eight rounds of negotiations, the Uruguay Round, developed and developing countries compromised to reach the "Agricultural Agreement". A new round of the Doha Development, started from Nov.2001, has ended in deadlock for many times because of the intense disputes among the members.The final success of the Doha Round is largely attributed to the progress of the agricultural negotiations. Over10years, along with the debates and compromises, the Doha Round experienced the bursting of the conference in Cancun, the hard formation of "July Package", and the progress made on "Hong Kong Ministerial Meeting". During the negotiations, though countries want to maintain their own interests, meanwhile, since the Cancun Meeting, many countries tended to work together with countries of similar interests to fight with the ones of completely opposite position. This resulted in the formation of different organizations and the contradiction between the group of developing and developed countries, as well as the exporters and importers of agricultural products. Obviously, behind the slow progress of the agricultural negotiations are not only economic reasons, but also complicated political influences. This paper intends to link the game theory and domestic political factors of to explain one of the sticking point of the negotiation and predicts the course of the future.This paper is divided into five parts. The first part is introduction which puts forward the background, researching approach, the innovation and limitations of the paper. The second part is the literature review. The researching papers of foreign scholars on agricultural negotiation are quite abundant. They discussed different influences of negotiation results on developing and developed countries respectively, and on China separately; Domestic scholars’studies focus on the Doha Round negotiations on agriculture and sorting out the important issues. In order to better display the background, the third part analyses the progress of agricultural negotiation since Uruguay Round, and the situation of agricultural protection in major developed countries. Based on the evolutionary game theory method and the political economy approach, the fourth part models the game process among the member on international and domestic levels. The fifth part analyzes the current situation of China’s agricultural product trade. It indicates that as the import and export amount has increased, the import growth rate is significantly greater than export’s. On the one hand, it reflects the higher openness of Chinese agricultural products market; on the other hand, the Chinese agricultural products export still faces fierce competition and high trade barriers of developed countries. Next, this part analyzes the status of China’s agricultural protection through specific data. Finally we discuss the future position and the strategy that China should take in the agricultural negotiation.