Excerpt from: Durano and Francisco, Gender Issues in International Trade in Asia Pacific: An Overview. Report submitted to UNIFEM (2006)
Under agricultural trade, especially the Agreement on Agriculture of the WTO, the key issue[1] raised by advocates but still inadequately covered by research has been food security at the household and community level and food sovereignty at the national level. The issue of food security as this has been raised in relation to agricultural products can also be raised in relation to the impact of trade liberalization on other livelihoods engaged in by rural women and men that do not fall under the negotiating issues of the WTO-AOA. Examples discussed below are fish trading, traditional woven cloth production, sticky rice box production, and seaweed farming. Products from these activities are considered part of the discussions on non-agricultural market access or NAMA, which involve the trade of manufactured goods. They have been included in this section because they help to further illustrate the interaction between gender relations and the expansion of markets in the rural areas and in highlighting the critical link between small-scale production with the food security of poor households and communities…
[1] The set of subsidies that developed countries provide to their agricultural sector is a major negotiating issue in the WTO negotiations. These subsidies are preventing developing country products from competing fairly in developed country markets. A related issue is the dumping of these subsidized products into developing country markets. Dumping products means that imported goods enter countries at prices that are much less than their cost of production that has been made possible by subsidies See UNDP (2005) and UNDP (2003) for a fuller discussion.