Global agricultural trade liberalization: its impacts on Bangladesh

Handful of policy concerns evokes as contentious a controversy in developing economies as trade liberalization, openness and globalization. Critics comprising of politicians, labor unions, enterprise and intellectuals see the community economic system as inherently unequal, produced a whole lot worse by advocates of openness to trade and finance. Trade liberalization and economic integration in Bangladesh has led to substandard advancement with commercial development and even resulting in de-industrialization. Consequently growth and employment prospects have suffered. Cheap agricultural imports have overloaded Bangladeshi marketplaces, which make it out of the question for domestic enterprises and farmers to increase and survive. This view prevails because business efficiency under trade protection is quite dismal. This dissertation aims to gauge the impacts of trade liberalization and connects contrasting policies on agricultural trade and expansion, poverty and food security in Bangladesh. Agricultural trade accelerates agricultural improvement a lot more than domestic marketplaces by bringing income earnings and creating job opportunities. On the other hand, the contribution of agriculture in trade and GDP is regressing as time passes despite the fact that Bangladesh has a comparative advantage in producing agricultural products. For this reason, one of the greatest obstacles that Bangladesh encounters would be to boost living standards of rural poor while keeping up with the trade reform procedures at the international level. Therefore, the principal objective of this research is to examine the effect of agricultural trade liberalization and its ability to play a role in economic expansion and poverty reduction in Bangladesh. The study has found that the impact of agricultural trade liberalization on developing countries is very uneven. It has been established that the effects of agricultural trade liberalization are small overall and likely to be negative for a significant number of developing countries including Bangladesh. For net food importing countries, including most of the LDCs and the small island developing states and for cotton importing countries (Bangladesh), agricultural trade liberalization may have overall negative consequences because of terms of trade effects. It is important to note that, at the WTO, Bangladesh as an LDC is not bound to undertake any liberalization in its domestic agricultural sector in terms of tariff cut or subsidy withdrawal. This study establishes that the growth in the domestic agricultural sector does not only rely on the domestic policies and programs, rather global and regional trade policies have important implications for this sector. Lastly, the study identifies that; agricultural trade liberalization has adversely impacted the environment as reduction in soil infertility, exploitation of biodiversity, and environmental contamination. The study argues that agricultural trade reform guidelines/policies are not enough to confer positive aspects based on agricultural trade liberalization towards the poor. Suggestions have been offered for Bangladesh to formulate and implement complementary policies to reduce inequality and translate the growth into poverty reduction, food security, and environmental protection.