International Agricultural Trade between Rules, Policy and Science

Abstract
Agriculture has always been a matter of salient interest to various groups of influence. Practitioners, scientists or politicians all have diverse views on breeding, growing and harvesting. Agricultural policy lays at the heart of the domestic policy-making. Food Security, food safety and food sovereignty are concepts that are deliberated upon by members of national parliaments and decided on by federal ministers. It is then no wonder that an international agreement on agriculture, despite being on the agenda, has not yet materialized. Adding to the matter, scientific results do not offer unambiguous prescriptions on issues of trade and productivity and the contextual nature of agriculture policy must clearly be taken into account.

Biography of the Speaker
Bernard Lehmann (born in 1954) was appointed Director of the Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG) on 1 July 2011. Before taking up this post, he was Professor of Agricultural Economics at the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ). For many years he was the director of the Institute for Agricultural Sciences, and subsequently head of the Department for Agricultural and Food Sciences. Mr Lehmann came from a farming background and between 1973 and 1977 he studied agricultural sciences at the ETHZ and gained a bachelor degree in agricultural engineering. After working as a scientific assistant at the Swiss Farmers' secretariat in Brugg, he gained a doctorate from the Institute of Agricultural Economics of the ETHZ and then went back to work at the Farmers' secretariat and the Swiss Farmers' Union, where he was head of the agricultural economics section. From 1987 to 1991 Mr Lehmann was Deputy Director of the Swiss Farmers' Union.