CIAO DATE: 04/06

Agriculture and Supernationalism: A Comparative Study on North American and West European Policy-Making Experiences

Question

The proliferation of regional trading blocs in the 1990s raises a fundamental question: To what extent is policy making shifting from the national government to a regional entity? The conversion of GATT into the World Trade Organization, also in the 1990s, further complicates the search for an answer since new or revitalized multilateral rules also exert influences upon policy outcomes. I apply that question to a study of farm policy, with the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as my cases. The next two sections profile the importance of agriculture and my rationale in selecting the two cases before pointing out the organization of the remainder of the study.

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