Fragmented Protectionism and Liberalization Illusion in International Agricultural Trade

The article explores the issues of agricultural protectionism. It presents an overview of agricultural protectionism indicators and methods of trade restrictiveness estimation. The author assesses the scope of liberalization of international trade in agricultural products since its start after the Uruguay Round by examining the USA, the EU and Japan agricultural trade policies. The scope of that agricultural liberalization is regarded as limited because of an immense increase in NTMs, emergence of “fragmented protectionism”, i.e. protectionist measures are still in place for sensitive products. The author points to a huge change in agricultural trade policy, namely the shift from ‘hard core' (true protectionist) nontariff barriers to ‘soft' NTMs that are more about technical and safety requirements than trade barriers.