UNDERSTANDING INTERNATIONAL TRADE INAGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OFCONTRIBUTIONS BY AGRICULTURAL ECONOMISTSTIM JOSLING, KYM ANDERSON, ANDREW SCHMITZ, AND STEFAN TANGERMANNThe study of international trade in agricultural products has developed rapidly over the past fifty years.In the 1960s the disarray in world agriculture caused by domestic price support policies became thefocus of analytical studies. There followed attempts to measure the distortions caused by policies alsoin developing countries and to model their impact on world agricultural markets. Tools were advancedto explain the trends and variations in world prices and the implications of market imperfections.Challenges for the future include analyzing trade based on consumer preferences for certain productionmethods and understanding the impact of climate change mitigation and adaptation on trade.Keywords: agricultural trade; commodity prices; trade policy; agricultural trade distortions; measure-ment of agricultural protection; modeling agricultural trade.JEL Codes: F13, F55, Q17.The study of the economics of internationaltrade in agricultural and food products is a rela-tively new area of specialization in the agricul-tural economics profession. Certainly the threemainstream areas that dominated the first fiftyyears of the American Agricultural EconomicsAssociation (AAEA)—production economics,marketing, and policy—each acknowledgedthe existence of international trade, but theylargely ignored the analytical challenge ofunderstanding the behavior of internationalmarkets and their role in resource-use effi-ciency and income distribution. By contrast,most agricultural economists trained sincethe 1960s have been exposed to interna-tional trade theory and recognize the per-Tim...
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