WTO's Doha Cotton Initiative: A Tale of Two Issues

Kym Anderson () and Ernesto Valenzuela ()

No 5567, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Four West African nations have demanded the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda include a Cotton Initiative that involves two issues: cutting cotton subsidies and tariffs, and assisting farm productivity growth in Africa. This paper provides estimates of the potential economic impacts of (a) complete or partial cotton subsidies and import tariffs globally and (b) cotton productivity growth through the adoption of genetically modified (GM) cotton varieties. Use is made of the latest version of the GTAP database and model. Our results confirm that – unlike for other agricultural subsidies and tariffs – for cotton it is subsidy reductions rather than tariff cuts that would make by far the largest impact. For Sub-Saharan Africa the potential gains are huge relative to the effects on them of reforming other merchandise trade policies. And they could be more than doubled if that reform provided the cash for farmers to take advantage of the biotechnology revolution and adopt GM cotton varieties. But those potential gains, and the affordability of switching to costly GM seed, depend crucially on the extent to which high-income countries are willing to lower domestic support to their cotton farmers.

Keywords: computable general equilibrium modeling; cotton biotechnology; economic welfare; GMOs; subsidy and tariff reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D58 F17 Q16 Q17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-int
Date: 2006-03
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP5567.asp (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:5567

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP5567.asp

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Address: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 53--56 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DG
Series data maintained by ().