26 An alternative interpretation of history is that it is the most recent 25-year period of RRA changes that is aberrant. The RRA declines in high-income countries, according to this alternative view, are associated more with, in the case of the EU, its 1992 Single Market initiative and subsequent EU enlargements than with external reform pressure from other World Trade Organization (WTO) members,<sup>20</sup> and with the fact that the high protection rates of the mid-1980s represent a temporary spike above trend caused by the very low international commodity prices then, and conversely for the low rates in 2007-08 reported by the OECD. As for the rise of developing country RRAs in this alternative view, that simply follows the example of higher-income countries and will not stop when those RRAs reach zero. Inspection of the NRAs in figure 1 for exporting and import-competing sub-sectors of developing country agriculture reveals that the convergence of aggregate NRAs to near zero is mainly with respect to the exporting sub-sector. NRAs for import-competing farmers in developing countries, by contrast, are positive and (if one ignores the latter 1980s when international food prices spiked downwards) are trending upwards over time.

Moreover, when the RRA is plotted against the log of real per capita income and straight regression lines are estimated for developing and high-income countries, they both slope upward and at the same rate (figure 5). True, the intercept on the vertical axis for the developing countries’ trend line is lower than that for high-income countries. Nonetheless, in developing countries there are few signs of a slowdown of the upward trend in agricultural protection from import competition over the time period studied.<sup>21</sup> On the contrary, there are numerous signs that developing country governments want to keep open their options to raise agricultural NRAs in the future, particularly via import restrictions. One indicator is the high tariff bindings developing countries committed themselves to following the Uruguay Round: as of 2001, actual applied tariffs on agricultural products averaged less than half the corresponding bound tariffs for developing countries of 48 percent, and less than one-sixth in the case of least-developed countries (Anderson and Martin 2006, table 1.2). Another indicator of agricultural trade reform reluctance is the unwillingness of many developing countries to agree to major cuts in bound agricultural tariffs in the WTO’s on-going Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations. More than that, the current negotiations have

> 20 See Swinnen. As explained by Josling, the budgetary cost of continuing with the EU’s past levels of support would have sky-rocketed following the EU membership expansion eastwards, with little if any of those extra payments going to the traditional lobbyists for the CAP.

> 21 True, applied tariffs were lowered or suspended as a way of dealing with the international food price spike in 2008, but initial indications are that this, and the food export taxes or quantitative restrictions imposed that year by numerous food-exporting developing countries, lasted only until international prices returned close to their trend levels in 2009 (as happened after the price hike of 1973-74 and the price dip of 1986-87).