Agri-environmental politics in the US and EU
A Political Economic Study

Principle Investigators:
Gordon Rausser, R. Gordon Sproul Distinguished Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley

Leo Simon, Adjunct Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley

Kathy Baylis, Assistant Professor, Food and Resource Economics, University of British Columbia

A number of scholars in both the US and EU agree that in order to construct agricultural policy packages that are both politically sustainable and in compliance with the requirements of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is necessary to incorporate environmental provisions into these packages. The goal of this project is to investigate and compare the trend toward melding agricultural and environmental policy in the two regions, and to relate these developments to the current Doha Round of negotiations over the WTO. As a preliminary step, we are presently completing a comparative analysis (Baylis et al., 2004) of the agri-environmental nexus in the US and the EU. In that research, a number of key differences become apparent in the nature of this nexus in the two regions. These differences can be traced in large part to fundamental differences in the European and American political-economic landscapes. Currently this project is exploring the implications of these differences for the role that the WTO can play in promoting trade liberalization. The ultimate objective of the project is to develop a framework within which such proposals can be evaluated not only on their purely economic/trade-theoretic merits but also on the extent to which they are, first, politically implementable and second, achieve a degree of balance between marginal social economic benefits and marginal political costs.

On May 27-28, CIG, together with the Agricultural & Resource Economics Department, the Giannini Foundation, and the Institute of European Studies, hosted a two-day conference, "The Political Economy of Agriculture and the Environment in the US and EU."