Proceedings of the 13

Meeting of the

COMCEC Agriculture Working Group

attention to policies that would support the effective sharing of best-practice cases in agriculture and

agricultural trade.

Moreover, this topic is in line with the rules in the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA-WTO).

Therefore, all OIC member countries who are also members of the WTO need to pay attention to the

aspects of Commercial and Non Commercial Cooperation.

Policy Recommendations III: Promotion of Tariff Reductions and Bilateral Arrangements in key

products (e.g. sugar, meat, feeding stuff for animals, oil-seeds, live animals)

Rationale:

In accordance with the WTO agreement, tariff reduction is a necessity for multilateral, regional and

bilateral trade. With a view to achieving a more conducive trading system, OIC member countries need

to comply with the global rules of trade.

High tariff protection is observed within the OIC for the key product divisions and products (identified

in the research report as sugar, meat, feeding stuff for animals, oil-seeds, live animals) that would

otherwise be highly effective in boosting intra-OIC agricultural trade. The OIC member countries would

benefit from tariff reductions, particularly in key product divisions and products identified based on

both the growth of the intra-regional demand and the existing low intra-regional trade share.

In the research report, it is pointed out that a large fraction of exporter-importer country pairs matched

as potential partners for mutually beneficial trade does not have trade agreements with each other yet.

There is therefore significant room for improvement in trade performance of, and associated benefits

for member countries through bilateral agreements to be initiated to cover the products (live animals,

meat, sugars, feeding stuff for animals and oil-seeds) identified in the analysis.

Policy Recommendations IV: Developing and implementing multilateral trade arrangements

(e.g. TPS-OIC - Trade Preferential System among the Member States of the OIC)) with a view to

contributing to collaborative and sustainable agricultural trade development.

Rationale:

Developing and implementing preferential market access schemes, as well as to concluding more intra-

and cross-regional trade agreements/arrangements can help member countries benefit from the strong

intra-regional dynamics of agricultural trade by collaborating with regional partners to liberalize

agricultural trade on a preferential basis while reducing the potential for trade diversion costs that can

arise from the use of preferences or regional agreements. In this regard, Trade Preferential System

among the Member States of the OIC (TPS-OIC) gives an important opportunity to initiate such a basis

for liberalizing agricultural trade among the OIC Member States.

Policy Recommendations V: Enhancing the capacity of the Member Countries in collection,

management and dissemination of agricultural trade data with a view to designing sound and

evidence-based agricultural trade policies.

Rationale:

Limited availability of timely, reliable and consistent data on agricultural trade hampers evidence-based

decision making by both public and private sector actors in the Member Countries. There are some

important initiatives under the OIC umbrella such as the OIC Statistical Commission (OIC-StatCom) and

ICDT’s web portal called “OIC Trade Map.” Besides utilizing more effectively from the existing

instruments, new projects may be designed and conducted to identify the data availability and reliability

problems in agricultural trade policy measures all across the OIC.