Everybody knows that the boat is leaking: How Norway thwarts its WTO commitments

We conduct a WTO-consistent assessment of Norwegian agricultural programs and policy since 1995. Most important, we highlight cases where Norway has found ways to work around its WTO-commitments in order to avoid policy reform. On several occasions Norway has been on the edge of breaking the amber box commitment. In these cases, Norway’s response has been to abolish target prices on certain products, thereby excluding the corresponding market price support from the amber box calculation. In this way, Norway has been able to keep up production and forestall agricultural restructuring. Even if this is legal, it is clearly against the intensions of the WTO principles. We also argue that several of the entities put into green box are questionable. For example, the “Vacation and replacement scheme” seem to be amber support masked as green support.