World Agricultural Trade Reform: Insertion of Mexico's Agricultural Sector Under NAFTA and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, 1994-2012

Abstract

NAFTA agricultural chapter and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture are external influences to the Mexican agricultural reform, conceived as a historical process in constant transformation, that shapes the terms of the sectoral economic operation in a liberalization and commercial opening context. The work claims that there is clearly an influence of the external trade policy on the domestic agricultural policy and on its outcomes in the institutional framework, that forms the model of sectoral regulation. The methodology reviews three central aspects negotiated in the “access to markets”, “producer support” and “export subsidies” agreements and analyzes the scope for state intervention and the decisions made on each one of them for the 1994-2012 period. The conclusions show that these two agreements complement each other and that there are matters that provide the Mexican State a wide scope for intervention that has not been used sufficiently to promote sectoral development policies. The current international food order is briefly analyzed taking up the theorists of the International Political Economy (Gilpin, 1987; McMichael, 2009; Polanyi, 1957; Gray, 2000).