ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief nontechnical guide to the determinants of a growing country's changing agricultural trade situation. It discusses the actual changes that have taken place over the past two decades in the major countries on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. The chapter examines some implications of the developments, and of possible policy responses to them, for closer economic integration among countries of the Pacific Basin. Regional trade bargaining would be facilitated by the high regional shares of each Pacific Basin country's trade. The possibility exists for farmers to improve their managerial skills and for researchers to produce new land-augmenting and/or labor-saving agricultural technologies sufficiently rapidly for an economy not to reduce its agricultural comparative advantage as it grows. By contrast, all the large Latin American countries except Chile and Venezuela have a strong comparative advantage in food; the latter two have a very strong comparative advantage in fuels, minerals, and metals.
