Methods of Support from Rural Communities via Agreements of Agricultural in WTO and Guidelines for Iran

Introduction: Rural areas are affected by globalization and one of the globalization commitments. WTO accession creates both benefits and expenditures for countries especially rural societes in new member, but preponderance of created benefits and expenditures depends on country bargaining power in negotiation process and agreement acceptation. As there is not independent and separate agreement for rural areas in the WTO literature, on the other hand. Agreements of Agricultural (AoA) are the relevant issues for rural societies. Therefore, treatment with rural society is usually done through AoA. AoA is provided in there domains: “Market access”, “export subsidies” and “domestic support” Among these domains, domestic support is the most important issue to support porgrammes of rural development. Domestic support has three boxes that define by their colors Green box (permitted), amber box (slow down, i.e. be reduced) and blue box (for subsidies that are tied to programmes that limit the production). Green box supports, provided that no distort trade, or at most cause minimal distortion, is exempted from reduction commitments, and members can properly use this tool to support rural & agricultural development and environment maintemance. So, the purpose of this paper is to identify and analysis of green box measures in WTO members and present guidelines for rural decision makers in Iran. So research questions are as follows: How can a member support from rural area after WTO accession; and what is experiments of members?
Methodology: Methodology of this study is content analysis, Data were obtained from the WTO Web: Documents of 38 WTO members, including old and new members that had green box, have3 been reviewed and finally 17 members were selected for final analysis and study, Among 17 members, documents of United States and Europe Union i.e. the largest users of green box, has been completely studied, and regarding the other 15 countries (Australia, China, Georgia, Palestin. Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa, Thailand, Venezuela, Armenia, Estonia, Jordan and Panama), those items were selected that include the world “Rural”
Results & Discussion: Results show that the developed countries, such as US, EU and Australia, have defined diverse and various items and paragraphs to support from agriculture sector and consequently rural area, while developing countries have not diversified the items. For example, US has defined more than 65 items (with its details) to support from agriculture sector as well as in some cases their law and legislative fields is provided, such as Act of 2000, 2001 and 2005. Also, results show that according to “the ratio of support amount in green box to agriculture GDP (%)”, Estonia (49.32), US (48.34%) and Japan (24.24%) are three top countries, and Malaysia (1.31%), Armenia (1.45%) and Georgia (3.32%) are the three lower ones, Results also shouled that the important support measures are Irrigation projects and rural water aids. Payments for small and medium businesses, support of rural cooperatives, payments for rural industries, and payments for natural disastes (droughts, floods and storms) base on temporal and location conditions.

Conclusion: This study shows that the green box support tools is different from input subsides and price supports, and also shows that the larger user of green box has defined diverse and various tools to support from agriculture sector. As most of the support tools provided for agricultural sector in Iran are in the form of input subsidies and guaranteed prices and they are not exempt from reduction commitment in WTO literature, we suggest, for effective bargaining in WTOnegotation process and better supporting from rural area, current kinds of supports be changed to green box items, and their law & legislative requirements should previously be provid. These kinds of supports (green box items) can include: vulnerability and food insecurity payments. Agricultula and rural people insurances, natural disaster payments, payments for rural cooperative development. Payments for rural water and irrigation projects, research services aids. Rural newborn industry aids, payments for self-employment in rural areas. Among these items, as respects to more that 75% of the world naural disaster are occurred in Iran and rural areas are more exposed to natural disasters, government should effectively define budget items to compensate losses and strengthen infrastructure against disasters. These items should preferably define for different regionals base on their characteristics. As Australia has defined. Finally, It is crucial to rural and agricultural policymakers to separate rural shares from common payments because rural credits are not transparent in annual budgeting in Iran, for example in some cases payments for agriculture are paid for supporting from other area such as urban consumers, or in some cases, annual budgeting surveys show that it has been apparently paid for agriculture sector while researches really show that support from agricultural sector is negative. So we suggest rural development stakeholders and policymakers should consider these kinds of payments should not lie agricultural domestic support box, as a whole.