Peter Gallagher

For WTO noti­fi­ca­tions related to the Agri­cul­ture agree­ment, you can comb through the WTO’s “Doc­sOn­Line” data­base of Mem­bers’ noti­fi­ca­tions to find the data, or use the ‘short­cuts’ pro­vided on the WTO’s ‘Gate­way’ page for agri­cul­ture. But—as in the case of the tar­iff schedules—you’ll have to extract the data from the orig­i­nal doc­u­ments (mostly MS Word files) and make your own sum­maries. This is what I did for the data­base of SPS mea­sures I built a year or so back.

Or, if you’re feel­ing lucky, you could check the most recent Annual Reports of WTO, which often con­tain sum­mary tables of some of the data from the past year.

For­tu­nately, the United States Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture has filled the gap for sev­eral of the most impor­tant data series in the WTO noti­fi­ca­tions (duties, export sub­si­dies and pro­duc­tion sub­si­dies). The USDA site is not pretty, but it is much more func­tional than any­thing the WTO sup­plies. You can find both sum­mary spread­sheets and, if you’re com­fort­able with the jar­gon, small on-line data­bases that allow you to drill down to the detailed level of the data buried in the heap of Mem­ber notifications.

USDA WTO Agri­cul­tural Trade Pol­icy Com­mit­ments Database