Globalisation and agricultural trade

Abstract

For most of the past 10,000 years, long-distance agricultural trade has focused on crop seeds or cuttings, breeding animals, and farm production technologies, before the dramatic falls in trade costs over the past two centuries allowed the gradual addition of farm outputs in raw or processed form to long-distance trade. That process was helped or hindered in various periods and places by governments’ trade-related policies. This paper traces the impact of those developments on terms of trade during the first globalisation wave to 1913 and then looks briefly at the inter-war period, before concentrating on the period since the 1950s.