A comprehensive approach of dumping and import protection through four graphs according to the types of agricultural supports affordable by WTO Members

26 June, 2006

The WTO's Appellate Body has ruled that dumping should be defined as exports made at prices below the average production cost, but the question remains to identify this average production cost. Indeed, this concept is very ambiguous since a large array of upstream subsidies are reducing it in rich countries, whereas we have to compare the competitiveness of products on the world market in relation to poor countries which cannot subsidize their producers or their production factors upstream. That is why we have devised four types of graphs according to a rough typology of WTO Members and showing also the interrelations between the main indicators of agricultural supports used by OECD and the WTO boxes.