Developments in the Doha Round and WTO dispute settlement: some implications for EU agricultural policy

Progress in the Doha Round is assessed against the changes to the common agricultural policy (CAP) brought about by the Fischler reforms of 2003-2004, and that proposed for sugar. An elimination of export subsidies could place EU exports of processed foods at a competitive disadvantage because of high sugar and milk prices. Provided the single payment scheme falls within the green box, the likely new limits on domestic support should not be problematic for the post-Fischler CAP. However, an ambitious market access package could open up EU markets and bring pressure for further reform. If there is no Doha agreement, existing provisions will continue to apply, but without the protection of the Peace Clause; and increased litigation is likely. Further CAP reform is to be expected.

Curbing agricultural exceptionalism: The EU's response to external challenge

From 1948 to 1994, the agricultural sector was afforded special treatment in the GATT. We analyse the extent to which this agricultural exceptionalism was curbed as a result of the GATT Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, discuss why it was curbed and finally explore the implication of this for EU policy making. We argue that, in particular, two major changes in GATT institutions brought about restrictions on agricultural exceptionalism. First, the Uruguay Round was a 'single undertaking' in which progress on other dossiers was contingent upon an outcome on agriculture. The EU had keenly supported this new decision rule in the GATT. Within the EU this led to the MacSharry reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 1992, paving the way for a trade agreement on agriculture within the GATT. Second, under the new quasi-judicial dispute settlement procedure, countries are expected to bring their policies into conformity with WTO rules or face retaliatory trade sanctions. This has brought about a greater willingness on the part of the EU to submit its farm policy to WTO disciplines.

Potential WTO challenges to the CAP

Since the early 1990s the EU's CAP has undergone considerable change with, first, a switch from market price support to direct payments in 1992 and, second, a further decoupling of support with the creation of the single payment scheme in 2003. Nonetheless, whether the current Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations is successfully completed or not, the CAP will come under renewed scrutiny, as a result either of negotiated reductions in support or of litigation through the WTO's dispute settlement process. This article discusses CAP market price and income support in the context of these likely WTO constraints.

EU membership of the WTO: international trade disputes and judicial protection of individuals by EU Courts

The European Union (EU) is embedded in a pluralistic legal context because of the EU and its Member States’ treaty memberships and domestic laws. Where EU conduct has implications for both the EU’s international trade relations and the legal position of individual traders, it possibly affects EU and its Member States’ obligations under the law of the World Trade Organization (WTO law) as well as the Union’s own multi-layered constitutional legal order. The present paper analyses the way in which the European Court of Justice (ECJ) accommodates WTO and EU law in the context of international trade disputes triggered by the EU. Given the ECJ’s denial of direct effect of WTO law in principle, the paper focuses on the protection of rights and remedies conferred by EU law. It assesses the implications of the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) – which tolerates the acceptance of retaliatory measures constraining traders’ activities in sectors different from those subject to the original trade dispute (Bananas and Hormones cases) – for the protection of ‘retaliation victims’. The paper concludes that governmental discretion conferred by WTO law has not affected the applicability of EU constitutional law but possibly shapes the actual scope of EU rights and remedies where such discretion is exercised in the EU’s general interest.

Haircut undone? The Greek drama and prospects for investment arbitration

As a result of the sovereign debt crisis that engulfed Europe in 2010, investors are much more likely to pursue dispute resolution options when faced with losses. This paper seeks to examine the position of investors who suffered losses in the Greek haircut of 2012 in the context of investment treaty arbitration. The paper evaluates arguments that investments in Greek sovereign bonds have been expropriated by the introduction of retrofit CACs and that compensation is payable as a result of the protections offered by BITs. The paper investigates whether sovereign bonds come within the definition of protected investment in BITs, assesses the degree to which CACs act as a jurisdictional bar to investor-state claims and attempts an evaluation of whether claims could be successful. The analysis uses as an illustration recent cases brought against Greece at ICSID. The paper concludes by considering whether the Greek haircut was expropriatory and reflects on the possible outcome of current arbitrations.

Family-friendly employment laws (re)assessed: the potential of care ethics

In light of various reforms in recent years, this article provides a (re)assessment of the broad package of family-friendly employment rights and relevant dispute resolution procedure now available to pregnant workers and working carers. It exposes how the realities of working life for many pregnant workers and carers and the long standing desire to promote gender equality in informal care-work remain at odds with the legal framework. An argument is presented in favour of an approach that, based upon the concept of care ethics, better engages with the impact of the provisions upon crucial interdependent care relationships.

Best practice in the training, appointment and remuneration of members of dispute boards for large infrastructure projects

This paper reports part of a qualitative study into evolving practice in the implementation of the Dispute Adjudication Board (DAB) construction dispute resolution technique, a variant of the Dispute Review Board (DRB) concept used in the US and Canada. Data was collected through a focus group interview of 20 highly experienced dispute resolution practitioners from engineering and the law. The group was assembled from members of FIDIC-NET with direct experience of project DABs. The part reported here concerns practice and procedure for establishing DABs. The main findings are that: constitution of the DABs is often delayed because of either project owners' ignorance of the DAB process or deterrence by the cost of the DABs; such owners also tend to insist on appointing DAB members from local engineers and lawyers without sufficient understanding of the DAB process; rates of remuneration of DAB members vary widely; the training provision for DAB membership and advocacy skills is inadequate; the process of selecting candidates for DAB membership and negotiating the tripartite agreement between each member and the contractual parties needs to be navigated with great care to avoid raising ethical problems. The research contribution is threefold. First, it highlights the importance of realistic fees for DAB members within a standard framework in achieving timely establishment of a board that works well as a team. Second, it illustrates the use of qualitative focus group interview to study the impact of new contract terms from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Finally, it identifies areas where further research is needed.

Water management in Minoan Crete, Greece: the two cisterns of one Middle Bronze Age settlement

The two earliest structures of Minoan Crete that may be considered as large cisterns were both built in the first half of the second millennium BC (the time of the first Minoan palaces) at Myrtos-Pyrgos (lerapetra). A considerable feat of engineering and social management, they remain a most unusual attribute of a Minoan settlement, all the more so since the Myrtos river is/was available to supply water at the foot of the hill of Pyrgos. This paper presents these cisterns, briefly, in terms of geology and technology, the history of their use and re-use, and their relevance to understanding the culture and society (at local and regional levels) of Crete in the time of the Old Palaces, as well as their possible contribution to the political and military history of the period. I then review possible precursors of, and architectural parallels to, the Pyrgos cisterns at Knossos, Malia and Phaistos (none of which has been proved to be a cistern), and the later history of cisterns in Bronze Age Crete. Since only three others are known (at Archanes, Zakro and Tylissos, of Late Bronze Age date), the two cisterns of Myrtos-Pyrgos are an important addition to our still rudimentary knowledge of how the Bronze Age Cretans managed their water supplies.

Comparison of methane produced by straw fed sheep in open-circuit respiration with methane predicted by fermentation characteristics measured by an in vitro gas procedure

Reducing carbon conversion of ruminally degraded feed into methane increases feed efficiency and reduces emission of this potent greenhouse gas into the environment. Accurate, yet simple, predictions of methane production of ruminants on any feeding regime are important in the nutrition of ruminants, and in modeling methane produced by them. The current work investigated feed intake, digestibility and methane production by open-circuit respiration measurements in sheep fed 15 untreated, sodium hydroxide (NaOH) treated and anhydrous ammonia (NH3) treated wheat, barley and oat straws. In vitro fermentation characteristics of straws were obtained from incubations using the Hohenheim gas production system that measured gas production, true substrate degradability, short-chain fatty acid production and efficiency of microbial production from the ratio of truly degraded substrate to gas volume. In the 15 straws, organic matter (OM) intake and in vivo OM digestibility ranged from 563 to 1201 g and from 0.464 to 0.643, respectively. Total daily methane production ranged from 13.0 to 34.4 l, whereas methane produced/kg OM matter apparently digested in vivo varied from 35.0 to 61.8 l. The OM intake was positively related to total methane production (R2 = 0.81, P<0.0001), and in vivo OM digestibility was also positively associated with methane production (R2 = 0.67, P<0.001), but negatively associated with methane production/kg digestible OM intake (R2 = 0.61, P<0.001). In the in vitro incubations of the 15 straws, the ratio of acetate to propionate ranged from 2.3 to 2.8 (P<0.05) and efficiencies of microbial production ranged from 0.21 to 0.37 (P<0.05) at half asymptotic gas production. Total daily methane production, calculated from in vitro fermentation characteristics (i.e., true degradability, SCFA ratio and efficiency of microbial production) and OM intake, compared well with methane measured in the open-circuit respiration chamber (y = 2.5 + 0.86x, R2 = 0.89, P<0.0001, Sy.x = 2.3). Methane production from forage fed ruminants can be predicted accurately by simple in vitro incubations combining true substrate degradability and gas volume measurements, if feed intake is known.

A revised Tobit procedure for mitigating bias in the presence of non-zero censoring with an application to milk-market participation in the Ethiopian highlands

Fixed transactions costs that prohibit exchange engender bias in supply analysis due to censoring of the sample observations. The associated bias in conventional regression procedures applied to censored data and the construction of robust methods for mitigating bias have been preoccupations of applied economists since Tobin [Econometrica 26 (1958) 24]. This literature assumes that the true point of censoring in the data is zero and, when this is not the case, imparts a bias to parameter estimates of the censored regression model. We conjecture that this bias can be significant; affirm this from experiments; and suggest techniques for mitigating this bias using Bayesian procedures. The bias-mitigating procedures are based on modifications of the key step that facilitates Bayesian estimation of the censored regression model; are easy to implement; work well in both small and large samples; and lead to significantly improved inference in the censored regression model. These findings are important in light of the widespread use of the zero-censored Tobit regression and we investigate their consequences using data on milk-market participation in the Ethiopian highlands. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Productivity change in Polish agriculture: an illustration of a bootstrapping procedure applied to Malmquist indices

This article illustrates the usefulness of applying bootstrap procedures to total factor productivity Malmquist indices, derived with data envelopment analysis (DEA), for a sample of 250 Polish farms during 1996-2000. The confidence intervals constructed as in Simar and Wilson suggest that the common portrayal of productivity decline in Polish agriculture may be misleading. However, a cluster analysis based on bootstrap confidence intervals reveals that important policy conclusions can be drawn regarding productivity enhancement.