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Reviewing Agricultural Trade Policies

To Promote Intra-OIC Agricultural Trade

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two non-OIC countries, Thailand and Brazil, have preferential trade agreements with 20 and 19

OIC countries, respectively. It is seen that a large number of preferential trade agreements were

signed across the OIC countries as well as OIC and non-OIC countries. As stated above, the

condition of large number of preferential trade agreements for a country may cause negative

consequences known as the spaghetti bowl phenomena where multiple memberships to

different regional trade agreements result in overlapping trade rules. This phenomenon is

particularly seen in Africa, creating discriminating high tariffs applied by the OICmember states.

Another problem with the preferential trade agreements across countries is related to their

potential role in further promotion of intra-OIC trade. The analysis presented in Section 3.4.1

presents potential country matches in order to promote intra-OIC trade in agricultural. The

analysis is done with five selected product divisions for intra-OIC trade promotion (live animals,

meat, sugar, feeding stuff for animals and oil seeds) and potential exporter and importer OIC

countries. Among the matches, the case study countries were examined to see whether there are

any existing preferential trade agreements with any of the potential partner countries. Turkey

and the Gambia are potential importer for live animals. Among the potential exporters, Turkey

has trade agreements with Malaysia and Morocco; the Gambia has a trade agreement with

Burkina Faso. Morocco and the Gambia are potential importers of meat; however, neither

country has any existing preferential trade agreement with potential exporters of meat. A

similar result is seen for sugar and feeding stuff for animals where Morocco is a potential

importer but does not have any ongoing trade agreement with any of the potential export

partners. This mismatch loosely indicates that establishing free trade agreements with a top

trade partner in agricultural trade would promote intra-OIC trade by exploiting the existing

match of mutual benefit with larger trade volumes.

Agricultural reforms and innovative designs

The case study analyses also yield information on the design, implementation and impact of

cases of agricultural reforms and other innovative market institutions. The Plan Vert or the

Green Plan of Morocco is one such example where multi-faceted reform actions helped, with

some success, the smallholders to integrate more strongly with global markets. Turkey’s farmer

registration system and e-commerce infrastructure services are examples of innovative market

institutions for easing market access and information diffusion. A similar situation is seen in the

case of the Gambia where the government of the Gambia prepared a policy paper under the

National Development Plan (NDP) currently led by the Ministry of Finance. The Agricultural and

Natural Resources (ANR) Policy (2017-2026) of The Republic of the Gambia aims for a favorable

environment for agricultural producers with an objective of maximizing poverty reduction. The

vision is a market led commercialized, efficient, competitive, dynamic ANR policy in the context

of sustainable development.

Stakeholder perceptions on promoting intra-OIC agricultural trade

Finally, it should also be underlined that there exist strong expectations for new intra-OIC trade,

investment and economic cooperation agreements that would be mutually beneficial to the

involved parties. Related with this is the strong emphasis put on the crucial role of the TPS-OIC

in establishing trade policy coherence across the OIC, and the overall understanding in the field

is that the process could be accelerated to allow for timely operation of the TPS-OIC.