A Preliminary Impact Assessment of Doha Round Results on Agricultural Policies in Turkey

Abstract:
Turkey’s membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) constitutes the single most important international regulatory framework for its agricultural policy, today and in the near future. There is a balance between rights and obligations: market access rights are guaranteed by the WTO schedules of concessions, whereas the rules for agricultural support policies are mostly defined in the Agreement on Agriculture, with Turkey’s own WTO schedule laying down the quantitative limits for government support measures and import tariffs. These op-portunities and constraints are likely to remain unchanged for as long as the Doha Round ne-gotiations on multilateral trade are pending. The presently foreseeable outcome will improve Turkey’s export opportunities but it also entails considerable import tariff reductions and do-mestic policy space restrictions. In order to cope with these challenges considerable ground-work is required now, leading to the policy adjustments necessary to ensure that Turkey can continue to benefit from agricultural trade as a source of economic growth. If “Doha” is to avoid exacerbating the already important dichotomy of Turkish agriculture, special adjust-ment measures will be necessary for the less competitive producers. The ongoing agricultural reform process in Turkey is of course a crucial element in assessing and reformulating Tur-key’s agricultural trade policy. This chapter aims at contributing to the debate from a global and interdisciplinary perspective.