Since the beginning of his second term, the Trump administration has negotiated bilateral Agreements on Reciprocal Trade (ART) in exchange for easing tariff rates. To be clear, despite the name, these agreements are not reciprocal. They extract concessions from other countries, while binding the United States to very little. To date, the U.S has signed ARTs with nine nations: Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Taiwan. More are currently in the works, including with the European Union (EU), India, Thailand, and Vietnam. These agreements contain provisions that undermine food sovereignty and bolster corporate power.
U.S Trade Representative Jamieson Greer argues that the United States has employed these agreements alongside tariffs to encourage inbound productive investment, domestic production, and open markets for U.S exports. International experts have reported on how the ARTs are structured to achieve these goals, including by undermining the national sovereignty of trade partners; hollowing out their domestic industries; placing critical mineral suppliers in a subordinate position to U.S. business; and isolating China, thereby forcing costly supply chain realignment and undermining the neutrality of third-party countries. As many authors have already noted, the terms contained in these deals are not fair trade. Rather, they disguise capitulation as commerce and reify a U.S-led international order under the threat of tariffs.
At the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, we are particularly concerned about provisions in these deals that limit each country’s ability to develop the food and farm system that meets their specific needs. We share in the analysis of international peasant and civil society groups, including Argentina Mejor Sin TLC and La Via Campesina, who have raised alarms over how these treaty provisions weaken national efforts to achieve food sovereignty.
In essence, the ARTs require countries to adopt U.S. standards on seeds and food safety. The expansion of restrictive intellectual property rights protections for seeds and U.S Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) into new national jurisdictions bolster the market access, power, and profits of multinational agribusiness firms — particularly large grain traders — at the expense of rural communities’ self-determination and economic health. Moreover, in an effort to further entrench U.S geopolitical power, five of the nine ARTs contain provisions limiting trade with third-party countries which have broken with the U.S regulatory regime.
Incentivizing a vicious cycle of concentration and debt
Six of the nine ARTs contain provisions requiring Parties to join the 1991 version of the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV 91). Of the other three nations, two (Argentina and Ecuador) were already members of the 1978 version of UPOV, which allows for an exception for smallholder farmers, while the constitution of one (Malaysia) conflicts with the Convention.
As IATP has argued extensively, UPOV 91 benefits international agribusiness while harming small and medium farmers. It does so by restricting farmers’ rights to seeds. Under UPOV 91, farmers are prohibited from saving, using, exchanging, and selling protected seeds — ostensibly to protect the intellectual property rights of seed breeders and thereby preserve the market incentive for developing new seed varieties. In practice, however, UPOV 91 consolidates the hold of agribusiness by restricting the agroecological possibilities to which seed sovereignty is crucial, and by creating economic pressures which hasten transitions to industrial agriculture.
UPOV 91’s restrictions favor the use of expensive yet elite germplasm, which raise yields in the short term for the small subset of wealthy farmers and corporations first able to adopt them, but which — in the long term — depress commodity prices as supply grows. Confronted by diminished prices, smaller farmers are forced to increase production to maintain income, and most frequently turn to the very seeds and agricultural chemicals at the root of the yield/price crisis. Many industrial seeds grow best with paired herbicides, or might require purchasing new machinery to handle the enhanced harvest. National sectoral adoption of this agricultural input suite increases growing costs — i.e., the capital farmers must lay out before harvesting any return.
Consequently, farmers internationally have assumed record levels of debt — often exploitatively financed or unserviceable due to low and volatile commodity prices — to remain competitive, only to face bankruptcy when harvests or market conditions fail. In their place, large farms consolidate and expand in close concert with heavily concentrated retail and input sectors. In the U.S. and abroad, we’ve watched these effects compound in an ever-worsening cycle, expanding the power and profits of agribusiness at the expense of the farms and workers who actually feed us.
The negative environmental impacts of shifts to industrial agriculture and their associated production practices are well documented. As my colleague, Shiney Varghase, put so eloquently, “to control seeds is to control life. A direct result of UPOV is the loss of local biodiversity.” Agricultural markets organized around industrial seeds incentivize farmers to plant specific monocrops en masse, displacing the crop varieties — known as landraces — adapted to local resource limits and animal species. Numerous studies have found that landraces are more resistant to pests, diseases, and extreme climate events than industrial seeds bred narrowly for maximum yield. To compensate for incompatibilities with local pests and soils, farmers turn to agricultural chemicals like synthetic fertilizer or pesticides causally linked to environmental destruction and human health problems. Moreover, when farmers move from landraces to industrial seeds, not only do they lose ecological protections of particular importance in a rapidly warming world. They also enter a global commodity market in which corn grown by a farmer in Indonesia is largely indistinguishable from corn grown on the flat plains of the American Midwest. This places under-resourced producers in direct competition with international agricultural giants and increases their vulnerability to global price shocks.
In short, joining UPOV 91 is a poison pill for developing countries. Today, four global agribusiness corporations (Bayer, BASF, Corteva, and Syngenta Group) control 61% of the global pesticide market and 56% of the seed market. These corporations are the primary beneficiaries of the system established under UPOV 91. The small farmers of diversified crops who actually feed us? They lose, alongside workers, consumers, and the environment.
Setting U.S. food safety standards as the norm
Every single ART signed to date includes language establishing regulatory equivalence between the U.S food safety system and national agencies. This is to say, food products certified as safe in the U.S. by regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will maintain that status in new national jurisdictions without an independent review. The effect of this language is twofold: undermining consumer standards to facilitate market access for U.S. exporters.
The U.S regulatory system is not a gold standard for consumer or product safety. There is often a default assumption that chemicals are safe unless proven harmful, as opposed to the precautionary principle, used by many countries, which gives regulators authority to implement restrictions in cases where scientific evidence is insufficient. Many additives banned in jurisdictions such as the EU, which employs the precautionary principle, are allowed in the United States.
While the ARTs insist on the use of “sound science” in regulatory decisions, U.S. regulators rely largely on confidential technical papers produced by the very companies seeking certification. Since these papers can include proprietary information, they are rarely made public. This opaque system creates real barriers to external accountability and raises doubts about the actual safety of the ultra-processed foods which predominate in U.S. diets. Put simply, foreign countries should not cede regulatory authority to the U.S. Doing so facilitates the export process for large U.S. manufacturers and producers — potentially disrupting smaller domestic industries unable to compete with multinationals — while sacrificing the sovereign ability to 1) disagree with U.S assessments, and 2) maintain independent standards tailored to national consumer safety and needs.
Closely related to regulatory equivalence, and similarly present in every Agreement on Reciprocal Trade, are provisions which require that all Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) — i.e., food safety measures — are “science and risk based, and do not operate as disguised restrictions on bilateral trade.” While this language may appear benign, it was recently at the center of a trade dispute under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in which the U.S., joined by Canada, successfully challenged Mexico’s restrictions on genetically modified (GM) corn imports destined for human consumption. GM corn farming largely requires the use of herbicides like glyphosate, which is linked to cancer risk, so Mexico made this determination based on the evidence and its legally enshrined precautionary principle. Moreover, Mexico, the birthplace and largest national consumer of corn, sought to protect and encourage the growth of biodiverse native landraces that are simultaneously an Indigenous cultural patrimony, nutritionally superior, and better tasting than GM corn. In written comments submitted to the USMCA review panel, IATP supported Mexico’s decree, finding that it was pursuant to USMCA obligations on biodiversity and Indigenous legal rights. Furthermore, this decree was an important step in reversing some of the harms of NAFTA, which decimated Mexico’s ejido economy and displaced approximately 4.9 million rural persons unable to compete with the U.S corn sector’s economy of scale.
The outcome of this trade dispute, in which science and risk-based SPS served as the legal basis to defeat a national food sovereignty effort, should serve as a warning to countries entering into agreements containing similar language. The U.S has shown that food safety regulations are subordinate to the economic interests of large agribusiness. Moreover, the U.S is willing to wield its geopolitical power — including agreements with third-party nations — to exert pressure and enforce compliance on those who disagree with its assessments.
Given this precedent, further SPS language included in five of the nine signed ARTs amplifying U.S regulatory reach and geopolitical influence is particularly concerning. ARTs signed by Malaysia, Cambodia, Taiwan, Bangladesh and Guatemala contain clauses which prohibit entering “into agreements or understandings with third countries that include non-scientific, discriminatory, or preferential technical standards; include third-country SPS measures that are incompatible with U.S or international standards; or otherwise disadvantage U.S exports to such third countries.” This language is sweeping and creates a legal basis to isolate countries working towards food sovereignty in ways that threaten U.S agribusiness. In short, it strengthens the weight and reach of United States’ regulatory regime, while introducing further mechanisms through which the U.S. may coerce third-party nations into adopting agribusiness-friendly policy.
Conclusion
The Agreements on Reciprocal Trade advance the interests of agrobusiness by extending the corporate-friendly regulatory framework of the U.S. into new national jurisdictions. This is accomplished through the expansion of UPOV 91, and the adoption of U.S. SPS frameworks and regulatory equivalence. In addition to the specific articles discussed in this paper, further clauses which facilitate biotechnology uptake require agricultural commodity purchases from U.S. producers, and limit import licensing and facility registration combine to reduce costs and increase sales for U.S. exporters. Consequently, these agreements will likely accelerate smallholder displacement, undermine domestic agricultural sectors, and exacerbate corporate consolidation across global agricultural supply chains.
Local communities are resisting. Bangladesh's powerful student movement has begun to mobilize against the country’s ART, as have protestors in Indonesia. Sustained pressure by civil society organizations forced the Malaysian Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry to state that the ART was “dead and void.” While the ministry later retracted his statement, it has yet to officially ratify the deal almost eight months after its initial announcement.
Workers, farmers, and students know that these agreements do not serve us. Rather, they further U.S. and agribusiness control over critical industries and supply chains to the benefit of a wealthy few. Feeding the world healthily, sustainably, and justly requires a decentralized food web rooted in food sovereignty. These agreements, which favor fattening corporate profit over nourishing working people, are a step in the wrong direction.
