Agriculture has traditionally benefited from special arrangements which sheltered it from the full impact of GATT disciplines. Even today, at the WTO, agricultural policies are covered by a separate agreement which, to a certain extent, still shields them from generally applicable rules. Various political, social, economic and cultural arguments are put forward to justify this special treatment. The main justification is the need to guarantee, over time, stable food supplies in a world of fluctuating harvests and potential shortages. The Uruguay Round achieved two things with respect to agriculture. It introduced specific disciplines on market access, domestic support and export subsidies. The Agreement on Agriculture aims to reduce restrictions on trade in agricultural products by introducing disciplines to increase market access, reduce domestic support measures and reduce subsidized exports. The Agreement on Agriculture is one of the key agreements of the WTO system. The Agreement on Agriculture also aims to discipline and reduce all subsidies, while leaving room for governments to design effective agricultural policies. WTO agreements allow WTO members to protect their markets. The Agreement on Agriculture sets out the general criteria and conditions for exemption from the commitment to reduce domestic subsidies. The measures are known as the green box. Green box support measures are considered economically neutral. The WTO therefore does not impose any financial limitations on this type of domestic support. The fundamental condition for benefiting from a Green Box exemption is that the support measures must have no, or at most, minimal distorting effects on trade or production. The Blue Box exemption category of the Agreement on...... middle of paper .... ...development. However, as global information technology prices fall, the terms of trade shift to the detriment of major exporters. However, with elastic demand, the demand effect offsets the terms of trade effect, so that most net exporters enjoy net gains from trade. Before the signing of the ITA, investment, production and trade in IT products were already highly globalized. Long before the ATI was conceived, the US, EU and Japan had large export interests. First, it was a sectoral agreement negotiated independently of a multilateral trade round, rather than being part of a single commitment. The broad outlines of the agreement were discussed by the Business Advisory Group and interested partner countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and Mexico, in the context of the 1996 Forum Summit year. Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC))..