The world periphery in Global Agricultural and Food Trade, 1900-2000

In the last two hundred years, agricultural trade has grown at a remarkably rapid rate. In the first globalizing wave, international trade was based on the exchange of primary products for manufactured goods. This provided important opportunities for complementarity in certain countries on the periphery that took advantage of the opportunity to base their economic development on the growth of their exports and the linkages between them and the rest of the economy. However, most of the agricultural exporting countries, obtained few benefits from this model of development. In the second wave of globalisation, an intra-industrial trade increasingly replaced this pattern of trade. In addition, the more developed countries tended to protect their agricultural production, which have been a major obstacle to agricultural trade.