Agreement on Agriculture Re-Imagined Principles Paper

Background and Context

Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) Re-Imagined (ReI) – The Project

The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) Re-Imagined (ReI) project recognizes that there is an urgent need to transform the global food and agriculture trade regime, so that it favours a diversity of fair, sustainable and healthy food and agriculture systems. The project brings together an interdisciplinary, international team of experts who are developing a set of trade rules and practices to support and incentivize resilient global food security. They are articulating these in a Model Treaty, the text of which will be refined and finalized with stakeholders from around the world. The resulting AoA ReI Model Treaty will be offered as a heuristic to inspire bold thinking and inject energy into transforming the international food and agriculture trade regime.

The project is based on the observation that the main multilateral framework governing international agriculture trade is still the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), even though it was designed over forty years ago and is increasingly ill-suited to the realities of today’s world. Negotiations have been underway to reform the AoA for years, but not only is there no outcome in sight, the negotiations do not propose the fundamental changes that the world so urgently needs. Yet there is an appetite within trade and agriculture policy circles to test and apply new ideas about how to improve trade and trade-related rules to enable fairer, sustainable and healthier outcomes. And as multilateral trade governance is fragmenting and political developments in a number of countries are shaking the foundations of international cooperation, fresh ideas, concepts and approaches are increasingly being sought to rebuild or replace the current system with the public interest in mind.

The AoA ReI project considers that at least some food and agriculture trade is beneficial and acknowledges the importance of a multilateral framework. It considers that agricultural trade rules need a profound reconfiguration,¹ a fundamental overhaul. It is not seeking environmental or social adjustments or exceptions to the current agriculture trade regime, nor does it ask how trade or trade agreements can contribute to addressing problems such as natural resources degradation, erosion of biodiversity, or poverty. Rather, the project’s purpose is to shift the boundaries of our political and economic imagination and to open the way to a different intellectual paradigm. It offers a space to fundamentally Re-Imagine what food and agriculture trade should look like, what the rules governing it should do and what principles it should be based on.

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1. McGreevy SR et al. 2022. Sustainable agrifood systems for a post-growth world. Nat Sustain. 5(12):1011–1017.