Reviewing Agricultural Trade Policies
To Promote Intra-OIC Agricultural Trade
5
Introduction
International trade promotes economic growth and creates welfare gains for trading partners.
Yet, many developing countries face serious difficulties that prevent them from fully reaping the
benefits of international trade. Most members of the OIC are hardly exceptions: Majority of the
OIC member countries fail to tap international trade’s full potential, and this goes true not only
for their trade with the third parties but also concerning their bilateral trade with fellow OIC
members, or for the intra-OIC trade in general. Of the wide range of underlying reasons, not all
are applicable to or relevant for every single member state but there certainly are similarities
and patterns.
Scattered across a vast area spanning across continents, member states of the OIC are a truly
diverse group, not only in terms of land mass and population size, but also in terms of the level
of economic development and the composition of exports/imports. While it is generally true that
the OIC members are trading increasingly more with the rest of the world and among
themselves, growth rates and composition of trade vary widely across members. Many OIC
members rely heavily on oil and other natural resources or primary agricultural products as
their major source of export revenues, while others depend largely on imports of these products.
There is a large variation among members even when one considers trade in agricultural
production alone. Somemembers are net exporters of a fewor wide variety of products, whereas
others are significant net importers of many agricultural products, and may even be facing
serious food security issues.
To help the OIC member states formulate effective measures and policies so as to make greater
use of their potential as trading partners in global and OIC markets for agricultural products,
diverse needs and priorities of three existing regional groups should be examined. The groups
are therefore studied based on the similarities of the metrics measuring their potential and
performance in international agricultural trade, and other relevant characteristics, and studying
the (common) strengths and weaknesses of each group, together with the emerging trends in
the world markets.
As also stated in COMCEC Trade Outlook 2017, policy coherence is critically important indeed
in order for individual members to better integrate into global markets efficiently and to
overcome the challenges they face in overcoming their product dependency, high trade costs,
and securing the supply of affordable food for consumers and quality raw materials for
producers. This general imperative also applies to policies and measures that would help
promote intra-OIC trade in agricultural products. Sound agricultural trade policies to be
designed and implemented with these goals in mind require a review of the existing state of
policies so as to identify and remove any inefficiencies and weaknesses.
The OIC has 57 member states located in different parts of the world. The levels of economic and
agricultural development vary substantially across members. 36 of the OIC members have high
agricultural potential in terms of at least one of the main factors affecting agricultural
production. Within this group, 25 countries from different climatic regions rank among the top
20 producers of major agricultural products worldwide. The production and trade potentials of
these countries are in sharp contrast with those of the 21 least-developed members, located
mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, whose agricultural production capacity can hardly meet their
growing demand for food. This latter group rely heavily on agricultural imports, particularly
food products, and face serious food security issues.