Global problems require global solutions; economic cooperation, particularly in agriculture, needs to be at the top of the global policy agenda.
The goal of this paper is to analyse how international trade in general and agriculture trade in particular can be mobilised to meet these challenges and offer policy recommendations to support agricultural trade toward these ends.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section II begins with an overview of trends in Commonwealth agricultural trade at the regional and subregional levels and considers key challenges facing development in member states, including issues related to poverty, food security, and climate change. Section III focuses on the potential of trade policy to reduce poverty, improve food security, and promote economic development, followed in Section IV by analysis of why and how agricultural trade has been inhibited by various policy instruments. Section V surveys empirical estimates of the potential benefits of agricultural trade liberalisation based on the subject’s extant literature, including quantitative work on the implications of emerging mega-regional agreements, as well as adding some fresh insights via new estimates of the potential benefits of agricultural trade liberalisation at the product level for Commonwealth countries.
