Shifting the Paradigms of International Agricultural Subsidies Regulation to Advance the Human Right to Food

The regulation of agricultural subsidies under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) remains an acrimonious and challenging issue perplexing government policy-makers, trade practitioners and academic commentators at large. Central to this challenge is the view that the extant multilateral trade regulation rules governing agricultural subsidies under the ‘twin’ instruments, the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM), are, in terms of their formulation, unable to accommodate or, better still, promote the indisputably critical policy objective of food security, and by extension the realisation of the human right to food. This argument is compelling given that the extant international agricultural subsidies regulatory regime has not responded well to the pursuit of liberal trade in agriculture without compromising the legitimate food security concerns that WTO member states may have. This article proposes a pragmatic humanising approach to international agricultural subsidies regulation accommodative of sustainability concerns such as the realisation of the human right to food. It offers recommendations on how best to infuse international agricultural subsidies regulation with pertinent equitable and sustainable food sovereignty norms to promote the realisation of the human right to food, especially in developing countries.