Food sovereignty and agricultural trade policy commitments: How much leeway do West African nations have?

The 2008 food crisis has challenged the political legitimacy and economic efficiency of the liberalization of international agricultural trade. An alternative vision defended by the food sovereignty movement is that long-term food security cannot rely on dependency on food imports, but must be built on the development of domestic production with enough barrier protection to shelter it from world price fluctuations and unfair trading. The purpose of this paper is to look into whether the West African nations can achieve food sovereignty given their various trade commitments and other external constraints. The particularity of our approach is to combine a historical economic analysis with a political approach to food sovereignty and trade commitments. Our results suggest that external brakes on the development of food sovereignty policies are marginal, as the countries still have unused room for manoeuvre to protect their smallholder agriculture under the terms of draft World Trade Organization agreements and Economic Partnership Agreements and under the international financial institutions’ recommendations. Rather, the international environment seems to be instrumented by West African states that do not manage to secure a national political consensus to drive structural reforms deemed vital and further the food security of the urban populations over the marginalized rural populations. Recently, the regional integration process has made headway with a common agricultural support and protection policy project that could herald an internal political balance more conducive to food-producing agriculture.food sovereignty, West Africa, protection, agricultural policy, WTO negotiations

Food Sovereignty and Agricultural Trade Policy Commitments: What are the Margins of Manoeuvre for West African States?

International Relations/Trade,

Evolution of urban chicken consumption in Southern countries: a comparison between Haiti and Cameroon

Since the beginning of 2000s, in order to let poor people accede to meat consumption, several developing countries have opened their domestic chicken market to foreign imports, by reducing import tariffs. Thus local chicken meat competes with frozen pieces of chicken imported from the European Union or America, causing the loss of many jobs in the local chicken food chain. In order to highlight the determinants of urban consumer’s choice relative to chicken types, and assess the opportunity for local chicken to restore its market share, investigations have been done in 2005 and 2006, in Yaoundé (Cameroon) and at Port-au-Prince (Haiti) applied to 180 urban households in each country. While imported frozen pieces of chicken have almost entirely substituted for the local chicken which has already quite disappeared in Portau- Prince, Yaoundé consumers still prefer the local flesh chicken to the imported ones, at least for particular uses.Chicken, urban consumption, developing countries, globalisation, Cameroon, Haiti., Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Impacts of Western lifestyles in a telecoupled world:Mapping and specifying current and future demand for ecosystem services

Human use of natural resources is exceeding the planet's ecological ceilings. To reverse this trend, sustainable production and consumption was placed on the global governance agenda at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Since then, a large number of empirical studies have been carried out to characterise the environmental impact of consumption. It has become clear that humanity's pressure on ecosystems is mainly related to the use of natural resources for food, shelter and mobility, and that the wealthiest people contribute disproportionately to the overall pressure because of the consumption culture associated with affluence. It has also been shown that most environmental impacts are not visible to final consumers because the goods and services they use are often produced miles away. This understanding has largely been supported by conceptual and methodological developments around the concepts of lifestyle, ecosystem services and telecoupling. However, these concepts have only been marginally combined so far, leaving open questions about the role of lifestyle in explaining the use of ecosystem services and ecological impacts. This dissertation brings together ideas and methods from research around these concepts to propose indicators and tools to characterise the role of lifestyle as a determinant of the extent and geography of ecosystem services demand and impacts. Different aspects of lifestyle - diet, holiday, mobility - are empirically addressed, with a focus on Western countries where living standards are relatively high and affluent consumption is the norm. Chapter 2 questions the potential ecological outcomes of a large-scale shift from the current standard diet in the United States of America (USA) to more plant-based alternatives. Chapter 3 examines tourist preferences for different holiday styles as a determinant of carbon emissions from leisure travel within the European Union (EU). Chapter 4 draws a quantitative link between current mobility patterns in the European Union and the expansion of rubber plantations in the tropics, which is leading to deforestation. In addition, Chapter 5 critically looks at the trade model used in chapters 2 and 4 to trace the origin of commodities available for use in the USA and the EU and proposes a way forward. Finally, Chapter 6 synthesises the methodological and empirical findings of Chapters 2 to 5 and operationalises these findings into recommendations for businesses and governments on how to support the transition to sustainable consumption in Western societies. Overall, this thesis shows that our understanding of lifestyle as a determinant of ecological impacts can be improved by reusing available large-scale survey results, contextualising individual agency and substantiating indicators of demand for ecosystem services with qualitative information. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate that prevailing preferences in Western societies explain the extent and spatial patterns of demand for ecosystem services and associated impacts. They also highlight the dependence of Western lifestyles on far-flung ecosystems and globalisation processes such as international trade and leisure travel. This body of research therefore re-emphasises the role of demand-side measures in reducing the overall impact of Western societies and the importance of addressing potential impacts beyond borders. Ultimately, this perspective on the role of lifestyle as a driver of sustainability issues in a telecoupled world argues for cooperation between different actors - individual consumers, businesses and governments - to carry out the transition to sustainable consumption patterns

A graphical analysis of the functioning of tariff rate quotas: market access and welfare effects for exporting countries

AgFoodTrade Working Paper ; 7210Evaluation SMART - Auteur hors unité au moment de la publicationThis paper analyses the economics of tariff rate quotas assuming a large importing country and several different suppliers with differing levels of competitiveness. Eleven theoretical situations are distinguished according to the way the quota is allocated to exporters, the level of constraint imposed by the quota and the relative competitiveness of export suppliers. A graphical analysis is developed and the effects of tariff rate quotas on market access and welfare gains for exporters are discussed in the eleven cases

Agricultural tariff rate quotas in the EU 1997-2002 : do developing countries enjoy quota rent ?

AgFoodTrade Working Paper ; 7213Evaluation SMART - Auteur hors unité au moment de la publicationTariff rate quotas (TRQs) were introduced and legitimised as a market access instrument in the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA). TRQs combine both restrictions on imports, as well as safeguarding current or preferential agricultural trade flows. When market access is restricted by a high tariff level beyond the quota, exporters that enjoy the low in-quota tariff may be able to gain a share of the quota rent. Do developing exporting countries benefit from EU TRQs ? Are quota rents or the guaranteed market access the more important gain from the operation of these TRQs ? What interests should developing countries defend in the debate on TRQs in the WTO Doha Round agricultural negotiations ?This paper analyses the implementation of 87 EU agricultural TRQs between 1997 and 2002 to examine their economic significance from the point of view of developing countries. Analysis of the database shows that TRQ trade can generate a high preference margin but that the potential rent is not so high. Moreover, this potential rent is concentrated on bananas and sugar, because TRQs are actually binding for those two commodities. More detailed analysis of those products indicates that only a few exporting countries are likely to enjoy this potential rent: Latin American countries for bananas and ACP countries for sugar. Whether developing country exporters benefit from this potential rent depends on their competitiveness relative to world market prices as well as on the market conditions which determine whether rent is collected by the exporting country or by the importer

Concert recording 2022-02-06

[Track 1]. Ch’io mi scordi di te?…Non temer amato bene, K.505 / W.F. Mozart -- [Track 2]. Excerpts from Sieben frühe Lieder. Nacht ; Die Nachtigall ; Im Zimmer / Alban Berg -- [Track 3]. -- Poema en forma de canciones. Dedicatoria ; Nunca olvida ; Cantares ; Los dos miedos ; Las locas por amor / Joaquín Turina -- [Track 4]. At last, to be identified! / Richard Pearson Thomas -- [Track 5]. There are fairies (encore)

The value of agricultural tariff rate quotas to developing countries

Diffusion du document : INRA Station d'Economie et Sociologie rurales 65 rue de Saint-Brieuc 35042 Rennes Cedex (FRA)The purpose of this paper is to estimate the value of current TRQ market access to developing countries as a contribution to this debate. The value consists in the new market access which TRQs created (and the export surplus gained on these additional exports) plus the size of quota rents generated which accrue to developingcountries. As there is widespread agreement that little new market access was created by TRQs, which were mainly used to maintain existing trade flows, often originating in preferential agreements, this paper concentrates on estimating the value of rents accruing to developing countries. The results are interesting for at least two reasons

Teaching Honors Cross-Divisional & Active-Learning Courses: Terrorism & Torture from a Global Perspective

How do we engage undergraduate students in intercultural awareness and global citizenship? One way is to better prepare them for a service-oriented, complex, multi-lingual, and globally focused workplace. Our panel will present how a public university with a metropolitan mission encourages interdisciplinary, cross-divisional, and co-taught courses where French and criminal justice professors collaborate for a global education cause

Débat : L’Agenda de Doha et les enjeux pour les pays pauvres Hérité de l’Uruguay Round, le cadre des négociations agricoles est à revoir

Les négociations commerciales internationales à l’Organisation mondiale du commerce (OMC) ont été relancées en 2001 avec l’ambition régulièrement réaffirmée de constituer le cycle en faveur du développement. Le Doha Development Agenda (DDA) devait ainsi déboucher sur un accord favorable aux Pays en développement (PED) en particulier en ce qui concerne le volet agricole des négociations. Dix ans après le lancement du DDA, la perspective d’un accord semble s’éloigner, même si en juillet 2008 l..