Reviewing Agricultural Trade Policies
To Promote Intra-OIC Agricultural Trade
21
Since agricultural food products are more value-added than the agricultural raw materials, all
agricultural countries aim to increase their exports of the former category while decreasing the
latter. This trend can be observed on the agricultural rawmaterials exports for all the compared
groups except NAFTA and the Rest of the World (second graph of Figure 2. 4). However, for this
last group of countries there is a very rapid decrease since 2011, showing a clear decisiveness
of policy change in those countries towards more value-added agricultural exports. The group
whose reduction has been the most rapid in this category is OIC with 2.2% annual decrease in
the exports of the agricultural raw materials during the period. However, the highest export
volume of agricultural raw material was still realized by the Rest of the World in 2016, despite
the negative trend mentioned above.
Trading blocs have a tendency to leave the raw material exports to the Rest of the World while
continuing increasingly to export processed and higher value added agricultural food products.
A similar tendency is visible for Fish products. The leading group is the Rest of the World and
has increased its exports to reach 118 billion USD in 2011, while the latest figure available in
2016 is almost halved, down to 63 billion USD compared to a steady increase by the EU-28. Table
2.1 shows that average annual growth rate of exports from the Rest of the World in low value-
added agricultural rawmaterials has been 15.04%, while it diminished for the rest of the trading
blocs other than NAFTA.