Reviewing Agricultural Trade Policies
To Promote Intra-OIC Agricultural Trade
1
Executive Summary
This report studies the potential ways and means of increasing the volumes of international
trade flows in agricultural products within the OIC area, based on a review of the performance,
policies and practices of the member states in this domain. The report is prepared for the 13th
meeting of the Agriculture Working Group of COMCEC to complement the analytical report on
agricultural trade networks within the OIC prepared for the previous meeting of the Group.
All agricultural products considered in the report fall into three groups in the broadest sense:
Agri-food products, Fish products, and Agricultural raw materials. Within each of these three
product groups, there exists a number of product divisions, and each division itself covers
several products.
Products with largest shares within total agricultural exports/imports of a particular member
country or a particular regional grouping of the members reveal useful information about
comparative advantages/disadvantages of trading countries relative to destination/source
countries. For this reason, a special emphasis is placed on the analysis of the patterns or flows
of agricultural trade within the OIC as well as between the OIC and the rest of the world.
While this analysis provides a useful description of the current composition/structure of the
OIC’s agricultural trade, it does not necessarily offer any insights into the directions that the
members’ trade may take in the future, making it difficult to identify the product-country pairs
that have the greatest potential to boost intra-OIC trade. To look beyond the current trade
performance of member states and to explore areas for effective policy intervention, the report
takes product divisions with low intra-OIC import coverage but high growth rates of import
values as key products, and identifies main exporters and importers of these products based on
an analysis of trade flows.
In discussing policy interventions and related measures, the report focuses on three sets
agricultural trade policies: (i) border measures such as applied tariff rates, (ii) non-tariff
measures such as sanitary requirements, export subsidies and technical barriers to trade, and
(iii) bilateral and multilateral trade agreements among countries.
The study reaches the following conclusions:
 There exists considerable protection through high tariff rates within the OIC for certain
critical product divisions and products such as sugars and oil seeds, and potential
exporters of these products face high applied tariffs imposed by potential importers. A
similar pattern is observed for a large number of products at the product level for the
top export products of the OIC countries.
 Some other key product divisions such as meat are not subject to high tariff protection
but still exhibit low shares of intra-regional trade within the OIC region. Thus, non-tariff
measures may also be responsible for limited intra-OIC agricultural trade in certain
products.
 The OIC members that are also signatories of ECOWAS or Pan-Arab Free Trade Area
automatically build binding trade partnerships with each other through the regional
agreements they join in, but other OIC countries have only one or two trade agreements
involving another OIC country. In general, the OIC member countries have, on average,
fewer trade agreements with other OIC countries than their non-OIC trade agreements.