Proceedings of the 13 th Meeting of the
COMCEC Agriculture Working Group
10
3. Reviewing Agricultural Trade Policies to Promote Intra-OIC
Agricultural Trade
3.1. Overview of the Agricultural Trade Policies in the World and the OIC
Member Countries
Prof. Serdar SAYAN, the head of the team prepared the analytical report of the 13th Meeting of the
Agriculture Working Group, made two presentations on agricultural trade policies. The first
presentation focused on agricultural trade policies in the world as a whole and in the OIC member
countries. In the second presentation, Prof. SAYAN discussed the case study countries and outlined
the policy recommendations.
Prof. SAYAN started his first presentation with a background summary on the main purposes and
scope of the report. He emphasized that the OIC member countries have significant partnership
potential in agricultural trade. He also underlined that the main purposes of the report are to
analyze any regularities and patterns emerging from the review, and to precisely identify the right
measures needed to let OIC members reach larger volumes of global and intra-OIC trade in a wider
range of agricultural products by taking better advantage of their comparative advantages and
improving their competitiveness. Regarding the scope of the report, Prof. SAYAN stated that the
research report complements the previous report on agricultural trade networks prepared for the
12th Meeting of the Agriculture Working Group focusing on the identification of existing trade
networks in agricultural products.
Furthermore, Prof. SAYAN outlined the conceptual framework of the research by focusing mainly
on definitions of various agricultural trade policy measures such as tariffs, non-tariff measures
(NTMs), and trade agreements. Regarding data sources, Prof. SAYAN briefly mentioned sources
used for agricultural trade flows (CEPII BACI database) and agricultural trade policies (WTO RTA-
IS, ITC Macmap, and WITS).
Prof. SAYAN also introduced the quantitative and qualitative methodologies used in the analysis.
These include the analysis of statistical data on trade flows and trade policy measures, the online
survey conducted with stakeholders from the member countries, the key informant interview
conducted with stakeholders from 3 OIC member countries that were visited, and a specialized
quadrant analysis that allows the determination of key products and product groups.
After presenting these introductory aspects of the research, Prof. SAYAN summarized the main
findings of the analysis regarding global agricultural trade policies. First, he highlighted the
agricultural export shares of major trade blocs, i.e., NAFTA, EU-28, MERCOSUR, and ASEAN, and
compared these shares with that of the OIC in 2016. Prof. SAYAN also summarized how agricultural
export shares evolved from 2008 to 2016 in all these five trade blocs.
Prof. SAYAN continued his presentation with treemaps that summarize the product compositions
of exports and imports of these trade blocs. This visual analysis helps to identify the commonly
important products in the export and import baskets of different regions. Prof. SAYAN then
returned to the major findings of the research regarding the tariff rates. He emphasized that the
OIC as a whole records the highest within-bloc tariff rates (measured as trade-weighted, ad valorem
equivalent tariffs) in agricultural products as a whole as well as in three broad categories, i.e., agri-
food products, fish, and agricultural raw materials. Prof. SAYAN also stated that intra-regional
agricultural trade share of the OIC is 28% in 2016, placing the OIC at the third rank after EU-28 and
NAFTA.