Analysis of Agri-Food Trade Structures
To Promote Agri-Food Trade Networks
In the Islamic Countries
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TRCA helps highlight for policymakers the areas of largest impact, as well as those where
stronger imports can be expected as a result of liberalization (i.e., those sectors with
comparative disadvantage).
2.2. Direction of Global Agri-Food Trade
The previous section considered recent trends in global agri-food trade largely through the lens
of products. This section considers geography, and specifically major export destinations by
region. It takes the latest year of data available, 2016. Figure 7 presents results for 1995, while
Figure 8 presents results for 2016. Each bar shows the breakdown in percentage terms of the
listed region’s exports by importing region. The data are analyzed at the aggregate level, i.e.,
agricultural products, which includes all product groups, because introducing directionality
results in far more information to be presented, and aggregate analysis is sufficient to provide
an overall picture and some first analytical results, before moving to analyze the data in more
detail using network analysis methods, which are better adapted to the task.
A first interesting finding is that the importance of intra-regional trade varies sharply from
region to region, but is fairly consistent through time. On the low end, the Others group and
South Asia have only 3.3%and 11.0%of exports that are directed to other countries in the region
in 2016. By contrast, Europe and Central Asia directs 75.8% of its exports to the same region in
2016, and the similar figure for East Asia and the Pacific is 57.1%. There are many reasons for
these observed differences. Some relate to product similarity in trade: agricultural trade is
typically in dissimilar products, so countries with similar geographical conditions will tend to
engage in relatively less agricultural trade. Others, however, likely relate to policies that are
holding back the integration of regional markets. Regional integration has been challenging in
South Asia, for example, due both to more inward-looking development policies than are seen
elsewhere combined with a high degree of importance attached to self-sufficiency for historical
reasons, but also political tensions unrelated to trade policy that have nonetheless translated
into relatively limited economic exchanges within the region; agricultural trade is surely an
unintended casualty of these processes.
A second finding is that geographical proximity, even across regional boundaries, clearly favors
greater trade integration. For instance, Sub-Saharan Africa exports relatively heavily to Europe
and Central Asia, while South Asia exports relatively heavily to East Asia and the Pacific.