Reference no: EM133045664
Corse Code: BA 4International Business and Trade 1st
INTRODUCTION
It is obvious that workers, entrepreneurs, investors and owners of natural resources (i.e. the owners of productive factors) engaged in export industries stand to win from increased trade since their activities develop if exports expand. Contrariwise, the owners of factors engaged in industries which have to compete with products imported from abroad, i.e. of import-competing industries, stand to lose from increased trade. The distribution of the gains and losses arising from trade among the owners of productive factors will depend on the situation in the respective markets. In general, however, factors which are intensively used in an industry, for instance labour in textile industries or land in extensive farming, will stand to gain or lose more than those not intensively used. Similarly, owners of factors that are rather specific to the industry and hence relatively immobile, for instance workers skilled in some agricultural operations (e.g. pruning) or the owners of lands particularly suited to the production of specific crops, will gain or lose more than the owners of more undifferentiated and mobile factors.
If no domestic industries produce the imported good (or close substitutes), consumers (or the producers that use it as an input) will benefit from trade, without anyone losing. Intra-industry trade, where differentiated products from the same industry are traded, will in general have less negative impact on the domestic import-competing industry than trade based on specialization, where the import-competing industry may risk being totally swept away.
Since, in comparison with other industries, factor mobility and product differentiation are rather limited in agriculture, the farming sector is particularly vulnerable to the impact of trade. Thus, it is difficult for agricultural land to change its use to urban or recreational use in response to import competition, or for agricultural labour to find another type of employment since this normally requires reskilling and will often imply migration. It is possible for farmers to change crops to adjust to international competition, but weather, soils, technical know-how and other factors that may restrict or jeopardize possible changes will often come into play. Shifting from plantation or livestock farming to other type of agriculture will be particularly expensive and take a long time. These rigidities, typical of the farm sector, are one of the reasons why governments have traditionally tended to protect farmers from the effects of international competition.
An issue that has received much attention from trade welfare theorists is whether those who benefit from the opening of trade can compensate those who lose, so that the opposition of the latter to a free trade regime can be overcome and the gains from trade are better distributed. This may be possible in principle, but it is extremely complex in practice. The reason is the difficulty of agreeing on the exact amount of gains and losses and the identification of the groups involved, as well as that of establishing a mechanism to carry out direct payments from one group to the other. Governments may try to collect part of the gains, for instance, through export taxation. They may also be called to assist the losers, through some type of subsidy or transfer, but they will normally do this using taxpayers' (rather than exporters') money.
Objectives
After finishing this module, the students are expected to
- Identify and analyse the difference of food self-sufficiency and food security
- Evaluate the impact of globalization to International Trade
- Understand the concept of unequal exchange and how it affects international trade
- Enumerate and examine the benefits of trade to different countries
DISCUSSION
How do different countries benefit from trade?
This is a highly contentious subject surrounded by controversy and contrasting points of view. We cannot survey them all here but we will summarize some of the most representative ones.
The first view we have called "mainstream economics" to emphasize a theoretical tradition that is at the core of conventional Western academic economic thinking on international trade issues. While "mainstream economics" has much to say on the benefits deriving from trade and the welfare implications of protectionist policies and regional trade agreements, it does not offer much by way of predictions with respect to the intercountry distribution of trade gains.
As mentioned before, under the comparative cost theory the distribution of benefits is inversely related to the closeness of the international terms of trade to the domestic price ratio. However, in the original formulation of the theory by David Ricardo there was no explanation of how close the terms of trade would be to either of the domestic price ratios. Later economists, such as John Stuart Mill, stressed the role of demand factors in the determination of the terms of trade. Thus, if in our example, United States consumers are much more eager demanders of sugar than of chips compared to their Brazilian counterparts, the terms of trade will favour Brazil2, which will obtain most of the gains. This was a step forward but not yet a fully satisfactory theory since there was no explanation of the determinants of the demand for imported/exported commodities.
In more modern forms of the theory, the terms of trade continue to depend on the relative strength of the respective demands. The main prediction arising from this reformulation is a dynamic one stating that export-biased growth, i.e. growth based on technological advance in the export industry of a country, would turn the terms of trade against the country, lowering its share in the gains3. The opposite would happen with import-biased growth. The reason is straightforward: export-biased growth permits a decrease in the cost of exported goods relative to imported goods and hence results in a fall in the terms of trade. The opposite is the case with import-biased growth. In our example, if there is a technological breakthrough in the semiconductor industry, and hence in the production of chips, but not in that of sugar, there will be a tendency, under competitive conditions, for the price of chips to decrease vis-à-vis that of sugar. The above effects only take place, however, if the participation in world trade of the country in question is sufficiently large for a reduction in the domestic production cost to influence the international price of the commodity.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the distribution of trade gains between developed countries (the "centre" of the world economy) and less developed countries (the "periphery") became an issue of intense debate, due in no small part to the intellectual influence of Raul Prebisch, the Argentinean economist who was for many years at the head of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and one of the fathers of the Latin American structuralist school. The argument is based on the assumption of trade specialization between centre and periphery, with the centre specializing in exporting manufactured industrial products and the periphery primary commodities. After observing (and measuring) a secular decline in the terms of trade of primary commodities vis-à-vis manufactured goods, the structuralists set about to explain the reasons for this.
The decline was viewed not as a transitory phenomenon due to a specific set of circumstances but as something embedded in the structural features of central and peripheral economies and in the nature of the development process. In a nutshell, the declining trend in the terms of trade for countries in the periphery4 was explained by three reasons.
- The income elasticity of the demand for imports is lower at the centre than in the periphery due to the different type of the goods imported by both sets of countries - primary commodities in one case, industrial products in the other5. The consequence is that the process of growth, and hence of income expansion, raises import demand more in the periphery than at the centre pushing up the prices of periphery imports vis-à-vis those of exports and thus lowering the terms of trade.
- Asymmetries are postulated in the impact of technological change at the centre and in the periphery. In central countries, it is argued that technological progress tends to decrease the demand for periphery country exports (many of which are substituted by synthetic products). On the contrary, technological progress in the periphery increases the demand for capital goods and inputs produced at the centre. This also lowers the terms of trade.
- Product and factor markets are argued to be less competitive at the centre than in the periphery, with prices (particularly wage rates) showing more downward rigidity in the centre. As a consequence, cost savings from technical progress are passed on to export prices more in the periphery than in the centre, where a significant portion of these savings goes to improve wages. Also, during the downturn of the business cycle the prices of export products fall proportionally more in the periphery than at the centre.
A natural policy corollary of the structuralist view was the emphasis on industrialization as a vehicle for development, for if the diagnosis of the long-term evolution of the terms of trade was right, the development process could not rely on export-led growth based on primary products. The development policy associated with this view in the Latin American context of the time has come to be known as import-substitution strategy.
Theorists subscribing to the so-called "unequal exchange" view have also insisted on the uneven distribution of trade gains between the centre and the periphery. A key difference with the structuralists is that, while the latter focus on the trend over time of an observable variable, the terms of trade, the former have a more normative approach, focussing on the "unfairness" of trade between the two sets of countries at any given point in time.
Unequal exchange refers to the terms on which different commodities entering trade between the centre and the periphery are exchanged. Exchange is said to be unequal (in the normative sense of "unfair") because production conditions in the periphery lead to exporting goods at cheaper prices than if the conditions had been those of the centre. At any point in time, production conditions at the centre lead to high prices of the commodities exported, whereas production conditions in the periphery lead to cheap prices of exports.
What are the differences in production conditions between centre and periphery that give rise to unequal exchange? There are many answers to this question but we will consider two.
The first is that of Arghiri Emmanuel - the "classical" theorist of unequal exchange. Emmanuel's answer is wage rates. He assumes that institutional factors and negotiation (through union activity) set wage rates at the centre, and that wage rates determine prices and not the other way around. Capital is assumed to be mobile, and hence there is a tendency for the same rate of profit to be obtained at the centre and in the periphery. Because of historical circumstances, he argues, wage rates at the centre are much higher than in the periphery, the difference being greater than the difference in labour productivity. Higher wage rates together with an equal rate of profit give rise to higher prices at the centre, generating unequal exchange. Thus, if the centre had to supply for itself the commodities imported from the periphery it would produce them at much higher wages and hence would have to pay much more. This is true even after adjusting for productivity differences since differences in wages are bigger than those in productivity. Notice that Emmanuel, just like the structuralists, does not argue that the periphery will not benefit from trade but that the distribution of gains will be favourable to the centre.
From a policy perspective, no obvious recommendations emerge from the unequal exchange theory since there is little that policy can do to bridge the wage gap between centre and periphery countries. It is interesting, however, that the wage gap argument has been intensively used by labour unions in central countries to advocate protection, particularly in the United States. But the argument is used in this case in the context of unequal competition rather than that of unequal exchange. Thus, workers in central countries, e.g. United States textile or sugar workers, complain against the "unfair" competition from textiles imported from South Asia or sugar imported from South America, which are produced by workers earning wages several times lower than theirs.
A different answer to the question above comes from authors belonging to the under-development and dependency schools6. The answer is that production conditions at the centre and in the periphery differ in many ways and are not independent from each other: favourable conditions at the centre are closely related to unfavourable conditions in the periphery, and vice versa. Views among these authors differ but they have in common the emphasis on the role of historical factors and extra-economic sources of domination in the shaping of international trade relations. Inequalities in trade are seen in connection to inequalities in development. These in turn are seen as a consequence of the way in which the capitalist system has expanded over time and has come into contact with other modes of production, central countries subordinating periphery ones to their own advantage. The whole international economy is seen as a system of domination organized to the advantage of the centre, which generates under-development in the periphery. Periphery countries do not gain proportionately less from international relations - they actually suffer from them. Development hence entails breaking away from the system of dependency through self-centred growth strategies. Thus, while the structuralists highlight the consequences of periphery countries being primary producers and Emmanuel highlights those of their being low-wage producers, under-development theorists see the matter in terms of these countries being at the losing end of a world system of domination.
More contemporary writers, like Marcel Mazoyer, have highlighted the effect of increasing globalization on the unequal competition between modern agricultural producers and traditional peasant farmers, forced to compete on very unequal terms in the same global market.
Globalization
Globalization has entered our current vocabulary and our conceptual toolbox in recent years, practically since the end of the cold war. Trends in World and Agricultural Trade and the progress on multilateral trade liberalization reached under GATT/WTO are only an aspect of it. Other equally important economic aspects are the international mobility of factors, particularly capital, and the internationalization of production and investment decisions. Thus, capital markets are fully integrated today into a closely connected net, enjoying a single system of hedging which allows them to react to leads and lags and relevant economic information at the world level. Transnational firms, big and small, make production and investment decisions also at the world level, both through their network of plants scattered around the world and/or through a network of international contracts with third parties.
But globalization is not just an economic phenomenon; it has other important dimensions like the massive circulation of information at the world level due to the on-going revolution in communications technology, the growing inter-country standardization of regulatory aspects in economic, cultural, scientific, environmental and administrative matters, and the growing internationalization of life styles, human and aesthetic values, political agendas and social and cultural fads.
The multidimensional nature of globalization has been captured in the global village metaphor, i.e. the view that globalization has made the world's economy and society akin to that of a single village extending worldwide. The global village metaphor is an effective one but should be taken with a grain of salt, for globalization trends coexist with phenomena setting apart countries, regions and social groups and marking wide gaps among them. Thus, nationalist, cultural and religious movements seem to have increased rather than waned with globalization, and the technology and income gap between North and South also seems to have increased. If anything, the global village is a rather unequal and multifarious place.
While, because of globalization, the prices of agricultural commodities are roughly similar in different countries, differences in labour productivities are formidable. Thus, a European farmer well-endowed with land, inputs and equipment may alone produce 500 ton of cereal per year, while his counterpart in Sub-Saharan Africa working in a small plot of land with manual means may only be able to produce one ton per year. The point is not just the big difference in incomes ensuing from this gap in productivities, but also the fact that (i) continuous increases in labour productivity in modern farming puts a downward pressure on agricultural commodity prices, which is transmitted to peasant farmers throughout the world, and (ii) because of their low incomes, these farmers can hardly have access to modern technology.
In response to these criticisms that trade is unfair where countries have different bargaining strengths or very different productivity and living standards, mainstream theorists reply that the lesson of comparative advantage theory is that initial conditions do not prevent countries from being able to exploit the gains from trade. However, where there are asymmetric power relationships, the less powerful countries have a strong interest in a rules-based trading system which limits the ability of economically-stronger countries to exploit their position at the expense of weaker economies. This is a powerful reason why it is in the interests of developing countries to participate in and shape a strong system of trading rules.
PROTECTION VS. FREE TRADE: ARGUMENTS AND DEBATE
Everybody would agree today that countries can hardly survive without trade, and that even if they could live in autarky they would suffer much from it. Hence, trade as such is not a policy issue. The important question is how much trade? Should policy makers stand for free trade in all cases or should they envisage providing domestic industries with some degree of protection? The relevant debate is whether there should be more, less or no protection. We discuss below the main arguments traditionally put forward for and against protection.
The case for protection
Protection can be advocated for purely economic reasons or on other grounds such as equity considerations, national security objectives, the defence of vulnerable groups, to avoid risks rated as unacceptable, and to defend certain interest groups because of political calculation. In the agricultural sector, protection can also be advocated on food security grounds.
Among the economic arguments for protection the most influential one is that of the infant industry. Protection is justified as a temporary measure while a nascent industry develops and comes to the stage where it will be ready to face international competition. Several reasons may exist to protect an industry during its infant phase. Those more frequently quoted are economies of scale, managerial and technological learning processes, start up costs (e.g. opening marketing channels, bringing in and adapting technology), and economies external to the firms but internal to the industry that may take time and may need help to develop but once developed will allow the industry to stand on its own.
Protection is also advocated when markets relevant to the activity in question either do not exist or do not function well. Protecting the industry may allow it to operate under these conditions of market failure. Thus, for instance, lack or inadequate working of financial markets in a country may prevent an industry from raising the financial resources needed to modernize and withstand international competition. Protection may enable the industry to make the extra profits required to finance its expansion and technical improvement plans.
There is a related but separate argument in favour of protecting industries which generate positive externalities and spill over effects for other groups. An argument of this nature is used to advocate continued protection to European farmers under the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy). It is claimed that agriculture is a multifunctional activity whose contribution is not just food production but also environmental protection, land stewardship, and preservation of the landscape and lifestyle of the countryside. By protecting European farmers from foreign competition, these beneficial side effects of agriculture, for which European consumers and citizens are believed to be willing to pay, would be preserved.
Another economic argument is that known as optimum tariff theory. In the case of importing and exporting countries sufficiently large to affect the world price of the particular commodity, a tariff on imports (or a tax on exports) may serve to improve the terms of trade in favour of the country. This is because by restricting imports the tariff will weaken world demand putting a downward pressure on the price of the imported commodity. Similarly, by restricting exports the export tax will weaken world supply putting an upward pressure on the price of the exported commodity. Of course, gains from protection obtained by a country in this way are at the expense of its trading partners.
A type of protection often applied in practice, known as contingent protection, seeks to counteract "unfair" trading practices, in particular the type of competition that results from export subsidies or from dumping. Protection is advocated because the price at which the commodity enters the country reflects distortionary practices on the exporter's side. Hence, it is not a price that the domestic industry should be expected to match.
Social and political reasons for protection are often stronger than purely economic arguments. In essence, protection seeks to avoid the negative impact of import competition on the incomes of domestic factor owners. It is also a way of favouring certain groups considered meritorious of positive discrimination by the political decision-making process. This is the case with farmers in many countries, notably in Europe, Japan and the United States. Through the political process, for social and political reasons, societies in these countries have decided to give special economic treatment to their farming sectors, even at the cost of higher food prices to consumers and higher taxes (and also of reduced opportunities to other countries). This is a luxury that developing countries could hardly afford.
Sheer political pressure from powerful industrial or labour groups that stand to lose from free trade is also a common reason for protection.
Producing with the help of protection a more diversified collection of products than would be the case with free trade specialization may also bring wider social and political advantages such as improving national defence. This is an argument typically used for the protection of military and other so-called "strategic" industries.
Food Security Arguments
Protection can also be advocated for food security reasons. FAO defines the objective of food security as assuring to all human beings on a permanent basis the physical and economic access to the basic foods they need. This implies three different aspects: availability, stability and access. Thus, governments may try to ensure through protection that some minimum level of national production of basic foods is attained. Protection may also serve to shield consumers from severe fluctuations of external origin and to preserve the social and strategic advantage of food. However, the relationship between trade and food security is a complex one.
Trade can contribute to food security in a number of ways: by making up the difference between production and consumption needs; reducing supply variability; fostering economic growth; making more efficient use of world resources; and permitting production to take place in those regions more suited to it. But reliance on trade may also bring some risks such as uncertainty of supplies, world market price instability, and increasing environmental stress if appropriate policies are not in place
By contributing to growth of more efficient production, trade can be a source of income to a country. At the national level, additional foreign exchange from exports increases the capacity of the country to fill the eventual food gap. At the household level, the income generated by growth can improve access to food. This increase of income can benefit the poorer sections of population, provided they are involved in the production of exports or if there is an internal mechanism of redistribution or trickling down of the income generated. Some constraints may imply that small farmers are not able to benefit from opportunities for export production. Measures should then be taken to put them in a position to benefit from these opportunities. If not, their production could in fact be adversely affected by a possible increase of the price of land (due to increased opportunities of income from land arising from expanded trade).
In developing countries, export opportunities are usually better for non-food cash crops. Increased trade opportunities may therefore induce substitution of food crops by non-food cash crops. This can be favourable for the food security of producers if they can purchase food in local markets at fair prices. Food security could, however, be at risk if inefficiencies in the food marketing system result in high food prices. There are a number of examples where development of export cash crops has also resulted in an increase in food production because of the general improvement of input and service delivery to agriculture and the remaining effects on food crops of fertiliser used for cash crops. There are cases where the particular social and strategic value of food justifies some mechanism of protection. This is the case, for example, of drought-prone countries where food production is highly variable because of the frequent occurrence of droughts and where foreign exchange is mostly earned from agricultural exports. Export crop production is likely to follow the same pattern as food production, and hence foreign exchange earned from exports is likely to be insufficient in a "bad" year to import enough food.
The issue of diversification of agriculture is high in the agenda of many developing countries. One aspect of it is the diversification of agricultural exports. Many developing countries rely for their export earnings on one or two major commodities. Diversification aims at decreasing dependency on the fluctuations of the world market for these commodities and creating a base for more stable income flows.
Some countries are ready to forego income from trade in order to reduce the risk of food dependency on the world market. They are also ready to establish the mechanisms and pay the price to protect their food producers so as to encourage them to produce a certain amount of food. This can be justified when there is uncertainty on supplies (poor transport infrastructure, uncertain access to port facilities or others). It must be noted, however, that food dependency may then be replaced by another type of dependency, such as the dependency on fertiliser imports, particularly in the case of small countries.
Food dependency could also be induced by unfair trade practices like dumping or excessive export subsidies by trading partners which bring into the domestic market cheap food items against which local producers cannot compete. A concept that has gained increasing acceptance is that of food self-reliance. It implies maintaining a certain level of domestic production plus a capacity to import in order to meet the food needs of the population by exporting other products. Trade and Food Security: Options for Developing Countries, where food security issues in the context of the Millennium Round of negotiations are discussed.
The case against protection
Many of the arguments against protection are also used in defence of trade in general, and have already been presented in Section 2.2. The main arguments for free trade (as opposed to simply trade) or, equivalently, the main arguments against protection are four: that protection promotes inefficiency, that it encourages rent-seeking behaviour, that it always implies a net welfare loss, and that there are usually more direct and efficient non-trade measures to achieve the desired objective.
Food security vs. food self-sufficiency
The concept of food self-sufficiency is generally taken to mean the extent to which a country can satisfy its food needs from its own domestic production. It may seem that a country has more control over its food supply if it is not dependent on international markets, where food imports may come from countries which could be politically hostile.
The concepts of food self-sufficiency and food security differ on two fundamental points:
- food self-sufficiency looks at national production as the sole source of supply, while food security takes into account commercial imports and food aid as possible sources of commodity supply;
- food self-sufficiency refers only to domestically produced food availability at the national level, food security brings in elements of stability of supply and access to food by the population.
In other words, food self-sufficiency is linked to an overall perspective on development, which emphasises the need for an auto-centric approach, whereas food security is consistent with a view of development which incorporates international specialisation and comparative advantage.
Those who believe that countries should develop international specialisation both within agriculture and between agriculture and other sectors of the economy argue that failure to take advantage of comparative advantage means that the country will not fully exploit its productive potential.
Those who believe that self-sufficiency is more beneficial argue that comparative advantage in export crops such as tea or rubber is not inherent in a country's physical resources, but a result of historical investment in certain industries often by colonising powers who wanted raw materials for their own industries or consumption. They argue that this has locked some countries into producing commodities which face declining terms of trade on inherently unstable international markets. Far from increasing their food security, these countries have declining and wildly fluctuating export earnings, thus making it difficult to plan imports and develop medium-term sectoral or national development plans.
A more significant argument for greater emphasis on food self-sufficiency can be made when a country's main food staple is not traded internationally in great amounts, resulting in a thin market. This is the case for white maize, and possibly for rice. When this occurs, an increase in demand from more than one major importer can push prices up and create difficulties for all importers.
The first argument stresses that by isolating domestic producers, at least in part, from the pressures of international competition, protection permits inefficient industries to perpetuate themselves at the expense of domestic consumers and of the soundness of the growth process. It also checks the dynamic process of entrepreneurial learning and innovation stimulated by exposure to international competition. By reducing competition and artificially raising profits, more firms may be attracted and be able to survive in the protected industries than would be economically justified, reducing the market share of the remaining firms and thus preventing the attainment of potential economies of scale.
It is also argued that protectionist measures are usually granted by political decision-makers to production sectors on a rather ad hoc and frequently clientelistic way, and are often not connected to clearly identifiable and measurable losses from trade. This gives rise to situations where entrepreneurs and owners of productive factors in general focus their energies in lobbying decision-makers to obtain administrative concessions which would benefit them - referred to as rent-seeking behaviour. The proponents of free trade argue that since in most cases the political process makes the above almost unavoidable, countries are better advised to go for free trade without exceptions or, short of this, to go for low levels of tariff protection equally and transparently applied to all industries across the board.
Another argument against protection is that it makes society as a whole poorer in overall terms. The reason for this welfare loss is explained in greater detail in Module I.3 Instruments of Protection and their Economic Impact. Although producers benefit from protection, and the government benefits from the additional tariff revenue, their gains are more than counterbalanced by the higher prices consumers must pay for the protected commodity. If protection takes place through subsidies to producers or to inputs, then it will be the taxpayers that will lose out.
Of course, any cost to society must be weighed against the benefits which are sought from the protectionist policy. But it is usually the case that there are more direct and more efficient measures to address the market deficiencies which lie behind protectionist measures. For example, if it is desired to encourage infant industries, it would be better to do this through a targeted industrial subsidy than through trade protection which benefits all firms whether infant or not.
The prevalent consensus
For these reasons, with differences of emphasis, the consensus nowadays among policy-makers around the world is that trade is advantageous and that the growth of international exchanges should be encouraged. The road to increased trade is through progressive reductions in the level of protection. This should be achieved by means of negotiations and reciprocal concessions. There are two methods, not mutually exclusive, to progress along this path. One is through regional trade agreements, which seek the reduction or elimination of trade barriers among a limited set of countries, normally (but not always) adjacent. The other is through multilateral trade negotiations (MTN), like the ones which have taken place for several decades under GATT and are now taking place under WTO. These agreements are called multilateral because they exclude preferential treatment by one country to another country or set of countries, and are based on the application of the most favoured nation (MFN) clause to all countries entering the agreement.
In general, policy-makers do not make trade concessions without a quid pro quo. There is a history of international trade negotiations (and wars) of many centuries behind this. GATT/WTO negotiations are a modern system to discuss and agree on these quid pro quo in an organized and consistent manner. It is interesting that, while mainstream theoretical economists have traditionally focused on the gains from trade, implicitly or openly advocating the unilateral dismantling of trade barriers, policy-makers and practically-oriented policy economists have seen the matter in terms of reciprocal concessions. This is probably due to a better understanding by policy-makers and practical economists of the imperfections and extra-economic features present in the operation of markets, as well as policy-makers' exposure to pressures from political constituencies who may suffer from international competition.
PERFORMANCE TASK NO. 2
Discuss Comprehensively:
- There are winners and losers from trade. EXPLAIN.
- The impact of globalization to International Trade
- Farmers are vulnerable to trade changes because of the lack of alternative opportunities. EXPLAIN.
- The benefits other countries get from trade.
- A rules-based trading system is in the interests of weaker economies. EXPLAIN.
- The difference between food security between food self-sufficiency
- Food self-reliance is one approach to food security. EXPLAIN.
- The concept of Optimum Tariff Theory
- How do Trade can contribute to food security?
- Trade can be a source of income to a country. ELABORATE.