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Trade, Agriculture, and Climate Change: How Agricultural Trade Policies Fuel Climate Change Steven Shrybman November 2000  Trade, Agriculture, and Climate Change: How Agricultural Trade Policies Fuel Climate Change Steven Shrybman West Coast Environmental Law Association November 2000 Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 2105 First Avenue South Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404 USA tel: 612-870-0453 fax: 612-870-4846 email: iatp@ url: ?2000 Institute for Agriculture and Trade PolicyTable of Contents  Executive Summary 1 Introduction 1 International Trade and Agriculture 2 Agribusiness and Globalization 2 The WTO Agreement on Agriculture 3 The Contribution of Agricultural Production, Processing, Packaging and Distribution Systems to Overall Greenhouse Gas Emissions 6 Industrial Agricultural Production 7 Food Processing, Packaging, and Preparation 9 Transportation 11 Conclusion 12 About the Author 13 About the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 14 References 14 Executive Summary Many governments have grudgingly come to accept, at least rhetorically, the imperatives of averting global warming. They have undertaken to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at levels that will require substantial reductions in many developed countries. Simultaneously however, these same governments have embraced agricultural trade policies that will substantially increase the energy demands of global agricultural production and distribution systems, making it far more difficult to achieve climate change goals. This fundamental contradiction is a testament to our failure to seriously integrate environmental and economic policy. Moreover, the enormous and increasing energy demands of global systems of agricultural production and trade are inadequately accounted for. When all of the energy demands of these systems are aggregated, agriculture is lik