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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.