Agriculture is a vital sector in every country, yet its importance is often overlooked or discounted. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) is the centrepiece of global food and agricultural trade regulation. Yet it fails to support food systems that are consistent with the ambition of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Not only are global warming, biodiversity loss, epidemics, and conflicts putting pressure on food production and distribution worldwide, but agriculture itself is exacerbating these problems.

Agriculture has long been recognized as a particularly challenging area of international trade cooperation. And while trade bodies repeatedly note how important it is to foster sustainable agricultural production, consumption, and trade to ensure policy coherence between trade and development objectives or to support food security, healthy nutrition, and livelihoods, efforts to give effect to these aims in international trade fora remain mired in disagreement. 

In 2023, an interdisciplinary group of experts from the Global South and Global North came together to propose a new approach. This initiative—the Agreement on Agriculture Re-Imagined (AoA ReI)—is founded on the view that if properly governed, food and agricultural trade can be beneficial for communities, consumers, and the natural world. The AoA ReI initiative steps away from the WTO; rather than proposing piece-meal adjustments to the current international legal framework, it puts forward a new set of rules.

The Draft Model Treaty on Agriculture Trade for Sustainable Food Systems, recently published by the AoA ReI initiative, sets out a comprehensive set of principles, objectives, and rules for agriculture trade.

Regulating Trade to Achieve Societal Objectives

The Model Treaty’s main novelty is to define a purpose for food and agricultural trade and the rules that govern such trade: to achieve food security and sustainable food systems. It thus flips the AoA’s logic in that it allows any trade-related policy or measure as long as it is compatible with a country’s food security strategy. The treaty requires parties to define a pathway towards domestic sustainable food systems. It permits trade-related measures and policies if they are implemented as part of the country’s sustainable food system strategy and as long as they do not cause harm outside the country. The treaty also requires parties to redress structural inequalities and address issues of common concern (see section below on processes and production methods and structural inequalities). 

The Model Treaty centres on food systems rather than the measures—such as export subsidies or border measures—that trade discussions tend to focus on. The treaty thus differs from existing trade rules in setting public interest objectives for agricultural trade front and centre; rather than focusing on objectives such as generating economic growth, increasing trade volumes, or preventing trade restrictions or distortions. 

Sustainable Food Systems 

The AoA ReI expert group considered a number of articulations of societal objectives that trade rules should serve—such as “SDGs” or “resilient global food security.” As noted, the initiative chose food security and sustainable food systems, setting these out in the Model Treaty’s first article which reads: “The objective of this Treaty is to ensure that Parties’ trade policies support their obligation to ensure food security by transitioning to sustainable food systems.” A party’s trade policies must support this objective at the national level and must not undermine other countries’ efforts to meet it.

The Model Treaty defines sustainable food systems as diversified systems that respect planetary boundaries and contribute to the food security of current generations without compromising that of future generations, and sets out criteria for sustainable food systems. The treatydefines food security broadly, noting that it exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The treaty understands the concepts of equity, sustainability, and resilience, as well as people’s right to define their local food systems, as forming an integral part of food security. 

By incorporating the international right to food legal framework, the treaty englobes cultural diversity, economic equity, health, nutritional, and other social justice objectives beyond just access to food. Indeed, the right to food requires more than the right to be free from hunger; it includes the notion of adequate food, points to the need for sustainable production, and requires particular attention to patterns of inequality both within and between countries. 

Embedding Trade Within International Law

The food security and sustainable food system obligations included in the Model Treaty are all drawn from existing international law. The treaty’s innovation is that it embeds trade-related rules within this existing corpus of law. Further, the treaty’s institutional provisions give a role to UN bodies, such as the Committee for Food Security and other relevant institutions, and assigns greater weight to deliberation, cooperation, and joint learning than controlling implementation, although it does include a dispute settlement system.

The Model Treaty is founded on a set of eight principles derived from international law, particularly environmental and human rights law. These include established principles like state sovereignty, international cooperation, and accountability, as well as emerging principles such as the recognition of food security as a common concern of humankind. The latter is a principle of international environmental law which triggers an enhanced duty to negotiate and cooperate to address a specific topic, as well as a firm obligation for each state to address the problem domestically.

By recognizing food security as an issue of common concern the treaty ascribes parties the right and responsibility to restrict trade of agricultural products whose production, processing, trade, or consumption is particularly harmful to humans and to the environment. The obligation is mirrored at the national level, given the emphasis on the international law obligation to transition towards sustainable food systems.

Acknowledging Processes and Production Methods and Reducing Structural Inequalities 

The Model Treaty’s Article 15 explicitly permits importing parties to distinguish between products based on how they have been produced, stating that parties have the right and responsibility to do so. Importantly it balances this with provisions to redress structural economic imbalances—this is necessary as higher environmental, labour, or social standards currently tend, de facto, to discriminate against those with least power in the global economy. Accordingly, Article 15 stipulates that 75% of the funds collected by an importing party through customs duties or border taxes will be directed to supporting implementation of sustainable food system policies and practices in parties whose exports are subject to such duties or taxes. The remaining income is allocated to the treaty institutions. This wording is a bold invitation to the trade policy community to reconsider the role and potential of trade tariffs.

Other treaty provisions also address root causes of persistent inequality between countries. Article 17 stipulates that to overcome patterns of commodity export dependency, high-income parties shall phase out tariff escalation in agricultural trade. Article 14 calls on parties to cooperate so that food products can be processed and packaged close to where they are produced, enabling value addition where commodities are sourced and reducing the environmental footprint of unnecessary transport.

Domestically, the Model Treaty requires parties to have a framework in place to mitigate negative impacts on those within its territory unable to absorb rising food prices that may result from higher standards. The treaty does not define how this would be done; leaving it to each party to design its own framework depending on the needs of its population and the characteristics of its food system.

Mitigating Corporate Power

The Model Treaty recognizes the vast power imbalances prevailing in international food markets and takes steps to redress these imbalances through strict competition rules and pricing policies. Article 11, for instance, requires a party to implement policies to prevent the abusive exercise of market power by large input suppliers, food processors, distributors, or retailers, and to regulate unfair buying and trading practices. Article 12 of the treaty links these obligations with measures to ensure predictability of food supplies and to stabilize prices.

To design the Model Treaty, the AoA ReI expert group first undertook three strands of activities: (i) a stocktake of current agriculture trading system shortcomings, (ii) an analysis of contemporary global needs, and (iii) an overview of existing international legal provisions. These scoping exercises resulted in two background papers. The first sets out the principles on which the Model Treaty is based, describing the process by which the principles were identified and expressed. The second analyses the evolving challenges for agricultural trade regulation and the ways in which the current framework falls short, making the case for new trade rules.

The detailed analysis of today’s global challenges enabled the AoA ReI initiative team to identify the factors to which the Model Treaty should be designed to respond. Having conceptualized what the treaty would need to achieve, the team then articulated the concepts in legal language.**

The AoA ReI initiative aims to demonstrate that new approaches to agricultural trade regulation are possible. The Model Treaty is offered to stimulate conversation, spark new ideas, inspire bold thinking, and inject energy into transforming the international food and agricultural trade regime.

Over the next few months, the team will refine some of the concepts it sets out in the Draft Model Treaty through further detailed analysis and testing of its proposed provisions as well as through discussions and consultations with partners and stakeholders working on agricultural trade and food-related topics. Following this process of analysis and consultation running until March 2026, the AoA ReI initiative team will finalize the Model Treaty for publication in June 2026.

* The  AoA ReI initiative is led by Caroline Dommen, Elisabeth Bürgi Bonanomi, and Sophia Murphy and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The initiative team is seeking feedback on the Draft Model Treaty until March 2026. To obtain a copy of the Draft Model Treaty, provide feedback, and/or participate in a series of thematic consultations taking place between December 2025 and March 2026, please contact the initiative team at aoarei@iatp.org.

** AoA ReI initiative members drew on and participated in other work with similar objectives. These include the Remaking Trade Project, the Making Agricultural Trade Sustainable (MATS) project, and the University of Laval’s proposal for an International Convention on Agricultural and Food Diversity and Sustainability. The AoA ReI initiative is complementary to other initiatives such as the dialogue on sustainable agriculture in the multilateral trading system at the WTO, the WWF’s Codex Planetarius, La Via Campesina’s Food-Sovereignty Based International Trade Framework, and the Leopoldina inquiry into the design of agricultural trade rules to support environmental objectives.

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Caroline Dommen works on economic policy from a human rights, feminist, and solidarity perspective. Caroline co-leads the Agreement on Agriculture Re-Imagined initiative.

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Synergies by TESS is a blog dedicated to promoting inclusive policy dialogue at the intersection of trade, environment, and sustainable development, drawing on perspectives from a range of experts from around the globe. The editor is Fabrice Lehmann.

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