The WTO, ECOWAS and the Prospects for Food Security in West Africa

This chapter focuses on the WTO’s Agreements on Agriculture (AoA) and other relevant regimes. It examines the impact of the rules of these Agreements by weaving together a two-tiered level of analysis based, firstly, on their direct impact on designated subsectors—particularly those of cotton and rice. Analysis of these two subsectors yield significant penetrative insights that have valid general application. The second tier of the discussion turns principally on the recognition of the fact that as more sectors of the economy are brought under neoliberal institutional control, the rule of the WTO provides the overarching contexts by which multilateral trading agreements within and between regions are structured.