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Abstract
An important issue in WTO trade negotiations is whether further liberalization of
trade and agricultural policies may help or hinder food security in WTO member
countries, especially the developing countries. The WTO recognizes various
classifications of countries: developed, developing, least developed (LDC) and net food
importing developing (NFIDC). How well do these categories capture issues of food
security? This paper employs various methods of cluster analysis (including an approach
based on fuzzy sets) and data for 167 countries to identify groups of countries categorized
according to five measures of food security: food production per capita, the ratio of total
exports to food imports, calories per capita, protein per capita, and the share of the nonagricultural
population share. The analysis identifies 12 distinct clusters characterized by
similarities and differences across the various measures. The analysis suggests that the
LDC category consists of largely food insecure countries, but that there also are food
insecure countries that are not LDCs. NFIDCs is less precise as an indicator of food
vulnerability, with more than a third of those countries not falling under any of the food
insecure groups. Also, the general category of “developing countries” is very
heterogeneous and is not very useful if the focus is on issues of food security. Finally,
our typology shows that all developed countries are included in food secure categories.
This result suggests that the notion of food security introduced as part of the
“multifunctionality” of agriculture, or, more generally, among non-trade concerns has a
very different meaning in developed and developing countries. In terms of policy
implications and the agricultural negotiations, maintaining the same label for two
altogether different situations may only obscure the issues being negotiated.