ABSTRACT
International conflict over agricultural regulation for more than six years threatened to collapse the whole Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and with it an agreement that greatly extends corporate power relative to national (and public) power. At issue, paradoxically, was a type of national regulation of agriculture whose days were already numbered. Even more paradoxically, Europe, cast as defender of the old ways, had committed itself to more basic domestic reform than the United States. Major changes initiated in the European Common Agricultural Policy have gone further than anyone imagined possible at the outset of the Uruguay Round (1). The choice in 1994 is not between “regulation” or “free trade,” therefore, but between new forms of implicit or explicit regulation.
