Managing Trade in an Increasingly Chaotic World: Synthesis Report and Key Recommendations from Four CAPI Trade Dialogues
Even prior to the devastating impacts of COVID-19 on global agri-food supply chains and trade flows in early 2020, the global trading environment had been shifting rapidly, with increased uncertainty, subsidies, protectionism, bilateralism, trade barriers, tariff wars and retaliation, while multilateralism has faltered. This underlines a disturbing drift from a rules-based trading system established by international negotiations to a power based one, dominated by the influence of two large trading countries – the United States and China. The Canadian Agri-food Policy Institute (CAPI) and the U.S.-based Farm Foundation joined forces to organize three dialogues with issue experts from agri-food supply chains and the policy community, academia, and NGOs from the US, Canada, the EU and Australia. CAPI held an additional conversation with Canadian government and industry stakeholders as well. The objective was to identify multilateral strategies for sustainable trade in agriculture and agri-food products and to discuss specific solutions to ongoing disruptions in global trade. CAPI summarized the key findings from these four dialogues in a synthesis report with recommendations.