The Design of EFTA’s New Free Trade Agreements: Towards a Post-Exceptional Treatment of Agriculture?

In recent years, one can observe a general shift from multilateral negotiations in the World Trade Organization to negotiation of bilateral and plurilaterale free trade agreements between two or more countries. The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is an active partner in this global shift. EFTA has signed several free trade agreements with potential significant consequences for different industries in its four Member States Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. This is four countries, which traditionally has treated agriculture as an exceptional industry. Thus, in this paper, consequences for agricultural industries is of most importance. Empirically, we will focus on the agreements with Indonesia (2018) and MERCOSUR (2019), which have potentially the greatest negative impact on agricultural industries in the Member States. The new EFTA free trade agenda represents a transition from agreements containing reciprocal reduction in tariffs to agreements covering technical issues like sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS), technical barriers to trade (TBT) and protection of intellectual property (IPR). Furthermore, the newest agreements contains a chapter on trade and sustainable development. The paper uses a historical institutional perspective as its theoretical point of departure. Institutional theory generally assumes that institutionalized policies are difficult to change. However, changes occurs and new international framework conditions may alter traditional trade policy positions. We will examine the following questions: Why has the design of EFTA free trade agreements evolved in this direction? What room to maneuver have EFTA in the negotiations, especially concerning agricultural interests? How do bilateral negotiations and agreements differ from multilateral negotiations and agreements in terms of power and influence? Who wins and who loses when EFTA negotiates free trade agreements? Do the sustainable development chapters influences other trade issues, or are they only attempts to hide environmental challenges in other parts of the agreements? The empirical material in the paper is based on interviews and documents from EFTA, and documents from Norway.