How should a just and sustainable agreement for international agriculture trade look like?

The project is based on the observation that the main multilateral framework governing international agriculture trade is still the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), even though it was designed over forty years ago and is increasingly ill-suited to the realities of today’s world. Negotiations have been underway to reform the AoA for years, but not only is there no outcome in sight, the negotiations do not propose the fundamental changes that the world so urgently needs.

The project’s purpose now is to shift the boundaries of our political and economic imagination and to open the way to a different intellectual paradigm: An interdisciplinary, international team of experts is developing a set of trade rules and practices to support and incentivize resilient global food security. They will elaborate a Model Treaty, which will be offered as a heuristic to inspire bold thinking and inject energy into transforming the international food and agriculture trade regime.

The rules for trade-related aspects of the food and agriculture system the AoA Re-Imagined project aspires to will be set out in a legal text, founded on a number of principles. The purpose of the present Working Paper is to identify, define and express these principles.

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