Introduction

There are probably few areas in world trade where the proposition that international trade law is a matter of political economy – as reflected in the theme of this book – is so notoriously obvious as in agriculture. And there are certainly few, if any, other papers that describe and analyze the political economy of international trade law for agriculture as sagaciously and convincingly as Bob Hudec's 1998 paper for the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium (Hudec 1998). Whole generations of agricultural specialists, the present author included, have written hundreds of papers and books about the treatment of agriculture in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Hudec, for whom agricultural trade law and policy is but one of the many areas he has covered in his research, needs no more than a few pages to explain in peerless clarity and profound technical competence the interplay between political economy and international law in the agricultural morass that plagued the GATT for a long time.

A few citations may suffice to highlight the way Hudec characterizes the situation of agriculture in the GATT before the Uruguay Round. He starts by noting that “according to conventional wisdom, the original GATT agreement, which lasted from 1947 to the end of 1994, was highly successful in reducing barriers to international trade in industrial goods, but it was a conspicuous failure in reducing barriers and other distortions to trade in agricultural products.”