Soybeans can be consumed directly as food, and in China they are the major ingredient in food products such as tofu and soy milk, but direct consumption is small relative to their wider use in animal feed, and it is the requirement for livestock feed that drives international trade. Rapid growth of economies and population, especially in Asia, has led to increased demand for animal protein and cooking oil. This paper analyses the recent growth in supply of soybeans from North and South America to China, and considers the factors that may affect this trade in future; a contrast is made with supply from North and South America to Europe, which has not been increasing. The constraints preventing an increase in supply of soybeans to Europe are reviewed. The paper concludes with brief discussion of the factors which will affect world markets for soybeans and soybean products in future.
Trade between South America and China has been an important source of the high growth shown by those economies in the 2000s. During the globalization of the 1990s, trade between the region and China had not developed so much. A rather sharp growth in China's presence in world trade since the beginning of the 2000s changed the world trade trends for MERCOSuR countries, or, at least, for many of them. The impact of the increasing trade of agrifood has been very relevant, and different per country. Strategy is another important issue, referring to bilateral relations with China. This country should be seen as a partner in the global trade, and not as a new foreign investor for the region, but this may be different in the context of different national strategies of South American countries.
For developing countries, the Uruguay Round had mixed results: some positive, some negative, and some negotiating areas only made marginal progress. In our view, adoption of the WTO rules for administering import barriers on contingent protection (mainly antidumping and countervailing measures), entailed a major positive institutional shift away from the high degree of trade policy arbitrariness that prevailed before. In contrast, strong pressures against liberalization of agricultural trade, resulted in the failure of this Round to establish rules on primary agricultural export barriers.Included among these are escalated export taxes that entail input subsidies. This paper reviews the experience of importing countries' contingent protection measures that sought to compensate the input subsidies from escalated export taxes in biodiesel imports from Argentina. The end result of a WTO that is empty of rules on primary agricultural export barriers has been the implementation of arbitrary policies taken by both the exporting and some importing countries. The non-functioning of the WTO Appellate Body created by US unilateral policies ensures that further arbitrary policy by Argentina in favor of its biodiesel industry will be retaliated by equally arbitrary policies by any importing country that so desires. We conclude that in much the same way that WTO rules on import barriers reduced the high degree of arbitrariness that used to characterize developing countries' import-substitution policies, multilateral rules on agricultural export barriers would imply a further positive institutional change for the benefit of both exporting and importing countries.
Rents, "infant industry" and contingent protection policies: gains and losses for Argentina's biodiesel industry Rentas, "industria infante" y políticas de protección contingente: ganancias y pérdidas para la industria del biodiesel en Argentina
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