Matias Margulis has written an excellent and welcome book on how United Nation (UN) organizations have intervened directly and indirectly in trade negotiations over concerns which proposed that trade rules could have adverse impacts on food security. While these organizations lacked specific trade mandates, the book examines how they were able to exert influence over the agenda, discourse, and sometimes outcomes of multilateral trade organizations. In a very rich case study approach, the author outlines how UN agents have gone beyond the role of providing technical and analytical support provided by International Organizations (IOs), Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), and academics by inserting themselves in the negotiations to shape outcomes that are consistent with their own sense of social purpose.
The case studies focus on four UN entities of varying size and influence. The first two studies focus on large UN agencies which enjoy observer status at the WTO – the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP). During the Uruguay Round, the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) efforts to influence members were driven out of concerns that trade rules would make food less affordable and less accessible for the world's poorest people. Margulis rightly credits FAO as the chief architect behind Article 16 of the Agreement on Agriculture and the Decision on Measures Concerning the Possible Negative Effects of the Reform Programme on Least-Developed and Net Food-Importing Developing Countries. Those provisions sought to ensure that the impacts of trade reforms on the least developed and net food importing developing countries would be monitored through the Committee on Agriculture and that members would work to mitigate possible negative impacts through financing and, where appropriate, food aid.
The second case study focuses on the WFP's successful efforts during the WTO Doha Round to block proposed trade rules which would have banned in-kind food aid. The WFP feared that such provisions would sharply limit the supply of humanitarian food assistance. The author highlights the WFP's tactics of publicly shaming negotiators by launching a media campaign with an advertisement in the Financial Times that depicted trade negotiators as recklessly endangering poor people (Margulis, 2023, 150). Such tactics were controversial with the then EU Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, as criticizing the United States, and the US-backed WFP Executive Director, James Morris, as politicizing the WFP.
My own experience as the US agricultural negotiator during 2007–2008 recalls a more positive role played by the WFP in the Doha negotiations in focusing the food aid negotiations towards disciplines on non-emergency humanitarian aid and monetization. By 2007, the WFP was shifting its own strategy away from providing in-kind food aid towards local and regional procurement, and where possible, cash assistance (WFP, 2023). Their movement allowed the US to make concessions towards stronger food aid disciplines, which led to a significant breakthrough in the negotiations on the export competition pillar and was reflected in the food aid annex in the draft text of December 2008 (Rev4) and in the 2015 Ministerial Decision on Export Competition in Nairobi.
More recently, the WFP (and the Food Aid Organization (FAO)) were helpful in the 12-year effort to reach an agreement at the WTO to prohibit countries from restricting exports of humanitarian food aid by the WFP. An agreement among the Group of 20 (G20) members had been reached on this in 2011 but was blocked by in the WTO by a handful of members (some of whom were G20 members). Both the FAO and WFP have been vocal over the past 12 years in their efforts to promote an agreement at the WTO.
For the two other case studies, Margulis focuses on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and its role in advising countries during the debate over Special Products (SP) and the Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) in the Doha Round and on the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF) for its role in advocating a solution to the public stockholding (PSH) issue during the 2013 WTO Ministerial in Bali (De Schlutter, Reference De Schlutter2011). These are small offices, and unlike the WFP and FAO, neither enjoys observer status at the WTO.
Unlike efforts by the FAO to acknowledge the impacts of liberalization on net food importing countries or WFP efforts to shape negotiations on food aid disciplines, efforts by the OHCHR and SRRTF to reach agreement on SP, the SSM, or the PSH have been less successful, largely because those topics have been particularly contentious with sharply divided opinions among WTO members. Since the collapse of the Doha Round in July 2008, negotiations on SP and the SSM have largely been moribund as they have been linked by members to progress in the market access pillar, which has also been largely off the table in negotiations. Negotiations over the PSH are on-going and will likely dominate the upcoming talks at the MC13, but the more promising avenues for compromise have been over technical fixes on how support for the PSH is calculated, not to exempt support for PSH as has been advocated by SRRTF (Glauber and Sinha, Reference Glauber and Sinha2021).
Margulis argues that the UN actors contributed to ‘ameliorating potential conflicts between the goal of agricultural trade liberalization and the goals of fighting world hunger and protecting human rights to food’ (p.177), but I think some might find this debatable for both the OHCHR and SRRTF. Margulis himself acknowledges that the OHCHR is often perceived as ‘anti-trade’ and the Special Rapporteur has argued in recent years to ‘wind down’ the Agreement on Agriculture in favor of a system based on a more managed trade framework (Fakhri, Reference Fakhri2020). Whether their views ultimately move the debate in Geneva towards consensus is unclear, but, for the present, they seem more willing to support arguments on one side of the debate rather than trying to bridge views to achieve an agreement.
But these are minor quibbles for what is really an excellent book that gives the reader insight into the complex and political world of trade negotiations and the role international organizations play in shaping or (sometimes) unwinding trade policy.
