• Is the international community really committed to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, especially when the EU and US have failed to curb highly damaging domestic farm support measures? How might the Cancun negotiations deliver more equitable outcomes for millions of small farmers in West Africa?

• Which commodities and supply chains require most focus to bring major benefits for smallholder producers? Are niche crops the answer?

• What combination of trade and complementary measures could bring substantial improvements to the welfare and incomes of West African producers? How can producer organisations engage more effectively at national and global levels in setting the agenda and influencing agricultural and trade policy frameworks?
  

• Against this background, the International Institute for Environment and Development and its West Africa programme are sponsoring this session to explore prospects for pro-poor growth in agriculture and trade for West Africa, the changes required in trade, market access and farm policy in the EU and US, and complementary measures essential for enabling producers and exporters to seize new and emerging opportunities.

Agricultural trade liberalisation has changed the terms of production and terms of trade for farmers worldwide, resulting in growing competition and accelerating a long-term decline of primary commodities prices. The international processes linked to these developments include a breakdown of market mechanisms to manage supply and production; the abolition of marketing boards; the dumping of subsidised agricultural products on the world market; and the low incentives for developing countries to add value to agricultural products due to tariff escalation. Moreover, non-tariff barriers such as high food and feed standards in developed countries, as well as private certification schemes, are contributing increasingly to market distortions, as in most cases only the larger and well-established agrifood actors are able to meet the respective requirements. Even so, one theme that is often missing in debates on trade policy is the issue of concentration of buying power and the increasing control over agrifood markets by a few large companies.

Some of these issues are acknowledged by the multilateral trading system, which is partly designed to tackle several of the drivers of distorted agrifood markets. However, since the WTO focuses on establishing a non-discriminatory system where the same trading opportunities are accorded to every actor in global trade, it fails to address the problem of equal treatment of genuinely unequal partners, often resulting in power imbalances and significant distortions in the market.

Key questions to be explored in the second part of this session include: Who gets what along the supply chain in terms of price? What is the influence of industrial concentration on supply chain structure, market access, price, and environment? What are the differential impacts on farmers and labourers, local agents/traders and communities in North and South? How does industrial concentration influence public policy and skew the ‘rules of the game’? How relevant are WTO negotiations to these issues, in relation to other levers of public policy and private sector policy?