Reviewing Agricultural Trade Policies
To Promote Intra-OIC Agricultural Trade
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businesses from one OIC member country invest in another OIC member country by
purchasing unused land and initiate agricultural production and export. Policies could
be designed and implemented to incentivize commercial cooperation among the OIC
member countries in the field of agricultural investment as it directly increases trade
among at least two OIC member countries. Removal or reductions in the cost of
obtaining business visas all across the OIC member countries, for instance, is a concrete
policy action that would contribute to commercial cooperation.
7. Non-commercial cooperation: Non-commercial cooperation among the OIC member
countries in terms of technical expertise, skills, and safety standards stands out as an
important action that would facilitate intra-OIC trade in agricultural products. Naturally,
the OIC member countries have a diverse set of safety standards, market information
systems, market institutions and human capital stocks. For this reason, the OIC member
countries could pay particular attention to policies that would support the effective
sharing of best-practice cases in agriculture and agricultural trade.
8. Statistical capacity with regard to agricultural trade flows and policy measures:
SESRIC has two specialized divisions working on agriculture and trade statistics, and
ICDT has web portals such as the OIC Trade Map. However, new projects could be
designed and conducted (i) to thoroughly identify the data availability and reliability
problems in agricultural trade policy measures all across the OIC and (ii) to develop
institutional reform agendas that would help the OIC member countries alleviate the
existing capability problems in the near future. A more specific policy action may be
establishing a new division on agricultural trade policy measures within SESRIC and
benefiting from this organ’s established capacities in data collecting and dissemination.
9. Directed research in agricultural trade policy analysis: The existing research
outputs obtained through the commissioned studies by the trade and agriculture
working groups of COMCEC are highly illuminating for a large set of structural problems
faced by the OIC member countries. But these two working groups could work together
with an understanding that evaluates trade as a whole and treat agricultural trade as a
subset of overall trade. One research question that may be targeted with this broad view
is concerned with the tariff equivalents of NTMs. A well-structured project could aim at
calculating these tariff equivalents for a sufficiently large set of products and countries.
The methodologies explained and exemplified in WTO’s (2012) A Practical Guide to
Trade Policy Analysis may be used to structure such a research project. Another way to
go forward is to develop and analyze general equilibrium models of trade policies and
trade integration both within the OIC and between the OIC and non-OIC countries.