The purpose of this study is to review the issues discussed in 2013 at the sessions of OECD Committee for Agriculture(CoAg) and its subsidiary bodies (APM: Working Party on Agricultural Policies and Markets, JWPAT: Joint Working Party on Agriculture and Trade, and JWPAE: Joint Working Party on Agriculture and Environment). This study drew some policy implications for Korean agriculture by analyzing the global market trend and prominent agricultural policies that are recently discussed in the OECD in 2013 and by analyzing the policy responses of major countries.
In the meeting of CoAg, Japanese agricultural Policy was discussed in the session with the participation of G20 members. Japan stressed the difficulty in shifting to a new policy mix requiring increased expenditure and other problems such as aging farm population, small farm size. The preliminary discuss for the preparation of 2015-16 Program of Work and Budget(PWB) was made. Many new issues were raised and especially the success of Bali Package in WTO should be taken into account for in -depth study in OECD.
At the December Gobal Forum, shared approaches to measuring the Agricultural Policy environment were discussed. While the PSE developed in OECD was the most popular measure in this regard and many international Organizations are using same or similar measures, PSE does not fully reflect each country's various agricultural policies, and it fluctuates frequently due to exchange rates, which is irrelevant with a country's agricultural policies. Thus it needs to be improved continuously.
The key issues that were discussed at the APM sessions were proposals for 2014 report on monitoring and evaluation of agricultural policies and 2014 OECD-FAO agricultural outlook, introduction of Chinese agriculture, measuring the incidence of policies along the food chain, waste management in the food chain, policy framework for investment in agriculture, smallholder risk management in developing countries, a conference proposal for livestock diseases, global food security for developing countries.
At the meeting of the Joint Working Party on Agriculture and Trade (JWPAT), member countries discussed the impacts of non-tariff measures on agricultural trade, the constraints to agricultural trade of developing countries, export restrictions on agricultural product, synergies between private standard and public regulations. Trade in Value-added is getting more interest in industrial products. Thus, new study focusing on Value-added trade for agricultural products were launched. Food Security is a very important issue not only for the developing countries but also for the developed countries. We need to scrutinize whether public stockholding can be an effective or efficient tool for achieving Food Security especially in resource poor countries with little influence on trade. OECD has a comparative advantage in analyzing policy impact. Thus, Korea believe that OECD can contribute significantly to find a permanent solution in this issue by doing further researches including scenario analysis
The main topics that were discussed at the Joint Working Party on Agriculture and Environment(JWPAE) were as follows: policy measures for supporting green growth, climate change-related policies and agriculture-related modeling options and comparative projections on the demand for irrigation water. The greatest challenge associated with climate change is the decreasing grain and livestock production due to global warming, leading to food security issues. Thus, the important issue in the agricultural sector is to establish a measure to minimize the adverse effects of climate change. The Committee should develop a systematic and reliable model to analyze the impacts and establish a range of adaptation policies so that the member countries can choose from them that suit their unique environments. The Committee should identify cases where land, water, and biodiversity resources are being managed in a cost-effective manner and conduct in-depth analysis study on these cases in order to provide information and knowledge to the interested countries so that they can draw lessons.


Researchers: Song Joo-Ho, Kim Chang-gil, Chung Ho-Guen, Moon Han-pil Lee Byoung-Hoon, Cho Jae-Sung, ,Kang Hye-Jung, Kim Yun-Sik, Park Han-Ul
E-mail address: jhsong@krei.re.kr