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Competition Has Become Intense.
Efforts to remove trade-distorting domestic subsidies and limits to market access to agriculture were objectives of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. Market access-limitation policies essentially maintain domestic prices above world prices and isolate domestic producers from competition and the volatility of the world market.8 While included on the Uruguay Round’s agenda, tremendous resistance was encountered from several important nations. The United States wanted to protect dairy products, sugar, cotton, and peanuts. Japan wanted to prevent rice imports. Despite efforts to settle differences on issues of market access, internal supports, and export competition, agreement on many items was not reached.
Biotechnology
Part of the economic revolution in the world today is the explosion of biotechnology. Biotechnology has been a significant reason why agricultural systems are much more productive. As alluded to earlier, the development of higher-yield crops results partly from genetic recombinant engineering, which takes genes coded for greater productivity and resistance to disease and drought and inserts them into a particular species of crop.
Besides enhancing the productivity and heartiness of food or cash crops, methods of biological control are increasingly relied upon to provide an environment-friendly means of controlling economically significant pests and diseases. Bacillus thuringiensis (B.t.). is a well-known example of a naturally occurring sporulated bacteria which effectively controls caterpillars, particularly tomato worms.
A variant of B.t., called B.t. israelensis or B.t.i., has shown its effectiveness in controlling malaria-bearing mosquitoes and blackflies which carry the parasite that causes river blindness. Efforts are now under way to insert the gene from B.t. into such plants as cotton. Initial research indicates that this procedure enables cotton plants to resist the boll weevil (anthonomus grandis). This particular pest caused an estimated $50-billion loss in US cotton revenues from 1909 to 1949.
In California’s Imperial Valley the pink bollworm caterpillar has caused the amount of land planted with cotton to drop from 140,000 acres to only 7,000 during the past 17 years. Today US cotton farmers spend $500 million on pesticides.