By MUNI FIGUERES

Latin America's prospects for sustained economic growth and higher living standards rest to a great extent on its success in selling more agricultural exports on the world market and boost productivity on the farm. But the region's ability to increase exports continues to run into serious obstacles beyond its shores, namely barriers to free trade erected by industrialized countries. While these barriers continue to fall for a wide range of goods and services traded worldwide, free trade and integration agreements routinely exclude agricultural products.

The hindrances to free trade in farm products are legion. They include export taxes and subsidies, government purchasing, stockpiling and trading, burdensome customs procedures, licensing requirements, tariffs, quotas, political pricing and discriminatory rates of exchange, and unscientific sanitary or phytosanitary restrictions.

In the OECD countries in 1997, total payments to farmers through a combination of direct subsidies, cheap loans and guaranteed prices represented more than $150 billion, which was close to 34 percent of the value of their agricultural production.

By contrast, since the mid-1980s Latin American and Caribbean countries have, with few exceptions, unilaterally slashed tariffs and other trade barriers, removed export taxes and reduced or eliminated the role of state trading agencies -even though the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade did not require them to do so.

The region's liberalization moves are irreversible, in large part because they are clearly beneficial. Barriers to trade throttle economic development and are inherently unfair, particularly to the poor. Taxes on imports are correctly perceived as indirect taxes on exports, while export subsidies encourage inefficiency and provide excuses for retaliation.

Meanwhile, demand for agricultural products will more than double during the next 50 years.

Latin America is ideally positioned to help meet this demand and is now rediscovering its tremendous comparative advantage in agriculture: large reserves of arable land, moderate population growth, and a great potential to continue to raise yields.

For all these reasons, Latin America must continue to be a strong advocate for eliminating agricultural trade distortions, a stance in which it has always had the full support of the IDB.

At the same time, Latin America can take steps on its own to boost agriculture.

Farmers and small-scale entrepreneurs need access to credit, technology, transportation, business know-how and markets. There is a pressing demand for research and development to improve productivity and increase product diversity. And agriculture, like other productive sectors, needs better communications, roads, bridges, ports, airports, and sources of energy to compete effectively in the coming years.

If these goals are met, agriculture will remain the fulcrum of the region's development process well into the next millennium, providing jobs, social mobility and a better quality of life to both rural and urban people.

* The writer is the IDB's external relations advisor and former Costa Rican minister for foreign trade.