The U.S. Value of Agricultural Production: A Measurement Framework with Implications for WTO Monitoring and Disciplines

Abstract A framework for reconciling data in U.S. notifications of domestic support to the World Trade Organization (WTO) with data from numerous U.S. sources is presented. The framework also allows projections of possible data in the future U.S. notifications. A country’s calculation of the value of production (VOP) for individual agricultural products and the total value of production are important for the analysis of domestic support constraints under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and in the Doha negotiations. The framework consists of 65 linked spreadsheets, grouped into 54 data and 11 result tables. Information flows from the data tables to the result tables based on procedures deduced from the analysis of U.S. notifications. The results suggest that the U.S. total value of agricultural production for WTO notifications may increase by 65 percent between 2003 and 2018. As a result, de minimis allowances could increase to US$36 billion by 2018. The VOP of corn would average US$48 billion from 2009 to 2018, making corn the main component of the total value of U.S. agricultural production. The framework was also able to detect several anomalies in the VOP calculations in existing U.S. WTO notifications, confirming that it is a good tool for analyzing these notifications in the context of existing and possible future WTO rules.