ABSTRACT
Agricultural trade issues frequently occupied center stage in the longrunning saga of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The difficulties associated with the agricultural negotiations arose, in part, because there has been relatively little reform of China’s trade policies for many of its agricultural commodities. As a consequence of this delayed reform and the complexity of the WTO’s agricultural rules, the implementation of WTO commitments will also be particularly complex. An important objective of this chapter is to go beyond the simple rules of thumb that have been used to date in analyzing the impacts of WTO accession on China’s agricultural trade policies (Ianchovichina and Martin, 2001; Development Research Centre, 1998). It is both a stand-alone paper and an input into a wider assessment of the implications of China’s accession to WTO on policy reform and poverty (Bhattasali, Li and Martin 2002).
