食糧安保와 DDA 農産物協商

Abstract

Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The effective realization of food security is essential to national sovereignty since the use of food as a political weapon among nations may limit and jeopardize the sovereignty of individual nations. Chronic food insecurity puts national security in jeopardy by placing at risk, the health of a large number of people, and also it incites internal turmoil and instability. Access to adequate food is also recognized as a fundamental human right under international law. With the launch of new negotiations on international trade called ‘Doha Development Agenda’(DDA), agriculture is once again expected to be a central and difficult issue. At the DDA agricultural negotiation, food security is a key element of Non-Trade Concerns(NTCs). However, the Agreement on Agriculture(AoA) have no provision on food security, and no definition on food security. The existing provisions of the AoA can not only solve the global food security problems but also have detrimental impacts on food security and sustainable development, consumer health and safety and the environment. The AoA does not adequately and equitably address the food security needs of developing countries and developed countries. The focus of the AoA is not food security but trade liberalization. Free trade alone cannot solve the global food security problems, since free trade may have both positive and negative effects on food security. It should be noted that the policy to achieve food security based only on food aid and trade liberalization is to risky in terms of long term public policy. Given the instability of agricultural production and food aid, it is in the special interests of many food-importing countries such as the Republic of Korea and Japan to increase domestic agricultural production to ensure food security. Therefore, the AoA needs fundamental reform from the perspective of food security, and food security should have top priority in agricultural negotiation and a revised AoA. Food security should be mentioned in the preamble of the Agreement as a central objective, and further developed in the Articles. As a solution to the problems associated with food security in the WTO negotiation on agriculture, this article suggested a creation of a food security box. The basic idea of the food security box is, (i) to allow, like other existing exemptions (such as Green and Blue Boxes), a series of exemptions to the AoA for members whose agriculture was not meeting basic food security needs (hereinafter the members); (ii) to allow the members to protect and enhance their domestic production capacity under certain conditions; (iii) to provide flexibility to the members so as to increase domestic support for agriculture until they have achieved a certain level of food self-reliance; (iv) to obligate developed countries to give to developing countries technical assistance for improvement in the productivity; (v) to balance the rights and duties between food-exporting countries and food-importing countries. Given the increase of North Korean defectors and food shortage, the Republic of Korea should actively participate in the discussion of food security at DDA agricultural negotiation in order to deal with food situations after the Korean reunification. In addition, the status of developing country should be maintained to minimize the negative impacts on agricultural sector.