Tariff and Non-Tariff Barriers to Trade

Historically, tariff and non-tariff policies have been widely used to restrict international trade in agricultural commodities. Many of these policies are now disciplined under the 1994 General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agreement administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO) through the “tariffication” process. Tariffication involves the replacement of all non-tariff trade barriers for a given commodity with tariffs which are then, over time, reduced in subsequent multilateral trade agreements. Between 1948 and 1994, through this process, tariffs on manufactured goods were reduced from an average of over 30% to less than 5%.