The Bioterrorism Act of the USA and international food trade: evaluating WTO conformity and effects on bilateral imports

The September 11th event focused the world’s attention on the threat of bioterrorism on the food chain. As a consequence, the USA implemented the Bioterrorism Act (BTA) containing new import requirements that can be classified as non-tariff barriers (NTBs). This paper analyses these NTBs by performing an assessment of WTO conformity and trade impact: hereby general problems in the analysis of bioterrorist risks are explored as for this new and unknown threat explicit WTO rules are still missing. Additionally, in exploring the BTA relevant process standard rules laid out by the WTO, the analysis indicates the extensive flexibility provided in this framework. This leads to larger scope for national polices on process standards compared to product standards (e.g. residua levels). The empirical trade flow analysis illustrates differences in the compliance costs between countries. This differentiation can be caused by learning costs that may differ among countries. The analysis highlights that perishable products and countries with small import quantities are mostly affected.food terrorism, non-tariff barriers, trade facilitation, Bioterrorism Act, international food trade, SPS Agreement, International Relations/Trade,

Welfare distribution between EU Member States through different national decoupling options. Implications for Spain

SUMMARY: This paper makes use of an agricultural sector model to analyse welfare effects derived from different national implementation options of the CAP Reform 2003. It shows that agricultural prices developed more favourable in a full premium decoupling scenario, since agricultural production declines more pronounced compared to a partial decoupling scenario. The use of the partial decoupling mechanism helps Member States to distribute income into less favoured areas but is not the optimal policy choice. However, if other Member States follow the same path of reform, a "prisoner's dilemma" will most likely be observed: partial decoupling appears as the preferred option for individual Member States, since high domestic production and high producer prices would be expected, but this would lead to welfare losses for consumers and taxpayers. Distribución de bienestar económico entre Estados Miembros ante distintas opciones de desacoplamiento en el marco de la nueva PAC – Consecuencias para España RESUMEN: Este trabajo modeliza los efectos en el bienestar económico derivados de distintas op-ciones de desacoplamiento de las primas contenidas en la reforma de la Política Agraria Común apro-bada tras los Acuerdos de Luxemburgo en 2003. Se observa como bajo un escenario de pleno desaco-plamiento, los precios agrarios evolucionan más favorablemente que bajo un desacoplamiento parcial debido a una caída de la producción más pronunciada. El uso del mecanismo de desacoplamiento par-cial permite a los estados miembros mantener determinados cultivos en zonas marginales, lo que resul-ta en una solución no óptima. Si los demás países siguieran el mismo camino de reforma, podría surgir un problema tipo "dilema del prisionero". La opción de desacoplamiento parcial aparecería como la opción preferida desde el punto de vista individual al asegurar una mayor producción doméstica y altos precios de producción. No obstante, a nivel agregado, el resultado sería una reducción de renta de consumidores y contribuyentes. PALABRAS CLAVE: Política Agraria Común, análisis de equilibrio parcial, modelización, desaco-plamiento, análisis de bienestar.Common Agricultural Policy, partial equilibrium analysis, modelling, decoupling, welfare analysis., Agricultural and Food Policy, C61, D60, Q18,

Imports in the Washington State Economy: Importance and Regional Effects of Import Liberalization

This paper focuses on the import side of a regional economy quantifying the economic impact of import levels and trade liberalization. An innovation represents the linkage of a regional with a national model by combining two separate Computable General Equilibrium models into one framework. This allows for import price formation in liberalization scenarios on the national level and subsequent incorporation of these nationally simulated prices into the regional model. The regional model is applied to Washington State, one of the most trade dependent states of the U.S, the national model to the U.S. Data for the two identically structured models origin from the IMPLAN database which divides the U.S. and Washington economy into 509 industries. For both models, Monte Carlo techniques are used to mitigate parameter uncertainty inherent in CGE specifications. Two scenarios are simulated that differ in the assumptions about the macroeconomic and factor market adjustment options of the economies.Computable General equilibrium, regional modelling, trade liberalization, International Relations/Trade, C68, R13, F17,

The Bioterrorism Act of the USA and international food trade: Evaluating WTO conformity and effects on bilateral imports

The September 11th event focused the world's attention on the threat of bioterrorism to the food chain. As a consequence, the U.S. implemented the Bioterrorism Act (BTA). These new administrative import rules will be evaluated regarding WTO conformity and trade impact. This analysis is based on an inventory approach systematizing the BTA, and a trade flow analysis. The BTA do not significantly deviate from WTO rules, however, the findings are driven by existing flexibility in international administrative import guidelines. The trade analysis highlights that products and countries with prior expedited or less regulated procedures and small import quantities are affected.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, International Relations/Trade,

Regulatory SPS instruments in meat trade

Policy makers have to choose between different potentially risk-reducing instruments regulating agri-food trade. Analysing the meat sector, the paper aims at identifying least trade distorting regulations for different policy goals relevant to the SPS agreement. For this purpose, a non-linear gravity model is estimated by Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood and applied to a panel data set at HS 4-digit level. Regulations are distinguished by a frequency approach allowing to identify the least trade distorting regulation for each policy objective. The results suggest significant differences of trade impacts between types of sanitary regulations.agri-food trade, gravity model, Poisson regression, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, International Relations/Trade, C23, F14, Q17,

Sustainable supply chains in the agricultural sector: adding value instead of just exporting raw materials; corporate due diligence within a coherent, overarching and partnership-based EU strategy

The corona pandemic has placed supply chains back on the agenda. The economic repercussions spotlight the complexity of today's global division of labour. Current German and European initiatives are seeking to tighten the responsibility of final business consumers for human rights and sustainability in their supply chains. The objective is to enforce sustainable production in sovereign third countries. In the case of agriculture these explicitly supply chain-based approaches need to be backed up by improvements in the European Union's trade, investment and agricultural policies. Influencing agricultural supply chains in such a way as to overcome their specific sustainability and human rights problems will require all approaches to be combined. Currently, conventional approaches treat supply chains in isolation, and only address imports flowing into the EU. As such, they consider developing countries exclusively in their traditional role as suppliers of raw agricultural commodities and ignore options for increasing local value added and fostering development. (author's abstract

Mapping agricultural trade within the ECOWAS : structure and flow of agricultural products, barriers to trade, financing gaps and policy options. A research project in cooperation with GIZ on behalf of BMZ

This study reviews the structure and flow of formal and informal agri-food trade within ECOWAS and evaluate the trade barriers, financial and quality infrastructure gaps. A mixed-method approach qualitative and quantitative methods is adopted which comprises an extensive literature review, analysis of available statistical data on formal and informal trade and trade barriers, a field survey, expert interviews and workshops. The intra-ECOWAS agri-food trade is still at the low level with most of the traded agri-food commodities largely without value addition and characterised by inadequate diversification of the export base. A preponderance of informal agri-food trade along both the formal and informal trade corridors are detected. Livestock, oilseeds, cottonseed, nuts, cocoa beans, cereal, cassava, fisheries, fruits and vegetables were the most traded agri-food commodities, which were not given any concession of passage or facilitated across the borders despite the perishability of the commodities. Agri-food trade flows in the ECOWAS are largely hampered by the heterogeneous trade policy measures across the Member states. This is often a barrier to trade and tend to increase trade costs and commodities prices, thereby constraining the regional trade benefits to the people while also making the trading countries uncompetitive. Women agri-food traders were often exploited and harassed by the different borders officials. More so, the low intra-ECOWAS trade in agricultural and food products is due to the low production capacities, which among others are due to the inadequate finance, poor quality infrastructure soft (trained inspectors, customs procedures digitalisation, certification, etc) and hard (metrology facilities, roads, ports facilities, testing and inspection laboratories, etc.). Agricultural trade finance has been identified as one of the key challenges inhibiting trade in agricultural commodities in this subregion. Strategic policy options to promote agri-food trade within ECOWAS are provided

Distribución de bienestar económico entre Estados Miembros ante distintas opciones de desacoplamiento en el marco de la nueva PAC - Consecuencias para España

[EN] This paper makes use of an agricultural sector model to analyse welfare effects derived from different national implementation options of the CAP Reform 2003. It shows that agricultural prices developed more favourable in a full premium decoupling scenario, since agricultural production declines more pronounced compared to a partial decoupling scenario. The use of the partial decoupling mechanism helps Member States to distribute income into less favoured areas but is not the optimal policy choice. However, if other Member States follow the same path of reform, a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ will most likely be observed: partial decoupling appears as the preferred option for individual Member States, since high domestic production and high producer prices would be expected, but this would lead to welfare losses for consumers and taxpayers.[ES] Este trabajo modeliza los efectos en el bienestar económico derivados de distintas opciones de desacoplamiento de las primas contenidas en la reforma de la Política Agraria Común aprobada los Acuerdos de Luxemburgo en 2003. Se observa como bajo un escenario de pleno esacoplamiento, los precios agrarios evolucionan más favorablemente que bajo un desacoplamiento parcial debido a una caída de la producción más pronunciada. El uso del mecanismo de desacoplamiento parcial permite a los Estados Miembros mantener determinados cultivos en zonas marginales, lo que resulta en una solución no óptima. Si los demás países siguieran el mismo camino de reforma, podría surgir un problema tipo «dilema del prisionero». La opción de desacoplamiento parcial aparecería como la opción preferida desde el punto de vista individual al asegurar una mayor producción doméstica y altos precios de producción. No obstante, a nivel agregado, el resultado sería una reducción de renta de consumidores y contribuyentes.Pérez Domínguez, I.; Wieck, C. (2006). Welfare distribution between EU Member States through different national decoupling options - Implications for Spain. Economía Agraria y Recursos Naturales - Agricultural and Resource Economics. 6(11):109-137. doi:10.7201/earn.2006.11.05SWORD10913761

A 2014 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Uzbekistan with a focus on the agricultural sector

Social accounting matrices (SAMs) are the core underlying data for economy-wide simulation models such as computable general equilibrium models. This paper reports the development of a SAM for Uzbekistan for the year 2014. The last SAM developed for Uzbekistan is based on the year 2001 (Müller, 2006) and Uzbekistan is listed among the top ten countries by GDP and population by the Global Trade and Analysis Project for which a recent input-output is missing. The SAM documented in this technical paper is characterized by a detailed representation of the agricultural sector. Generally, data availability in Uzbekistan is a challenge and the development process had to rely on myriad data sources. The final SAM values are estimated using an information-theoretic, cross-entropy approach. Using a Bayesian perspective, the degree of uncertainty of cell entries prior values reflected the availability and quality of data sources. In total, this SAM consists of 88 accounts. There are 31 commodity accounts and 31 accounts describe economic activities of which 17 activities are part of the agricultural sector. The factor accounts comprise five types of labor, capital, and main natural resources: land and water. There are three household accounts, one government, and five tax accounts. The authors hope that this SAM will allow researchers to investigate research questions that are of high priority for Uzbekistans future economic development, particularly those related to the future role of agriculture and water

Nachhaltige Lieferketten im Agrarsektor: Wert schöpfen statt zuliefern; Unternehmerpflichten politikfeldübergreifend in eine EU-Strategie einbinden

Lieferketten rückten jüngst durch die Corona-Krise ins Zentrum politischer Aufmerk­samkeit. Die wirtschaftlichen Folgen der Pandemie zeigen einmal mehr, wie komplex die glo­bale Arbeitsteilung über mehrere Staaten hinweg gestaltet ist. Aktu­elle deut­sche und europäische Gesetzesinitiativen streben mehr verbindliche Pflich­ten für end­verbrau­chende Unternehmen an, was Menschenrechte und Nach­haltigkeit in Liefer­ketten betrifft. Ziel ist eine nachhaltige Erzeugung in anderen Ländern. Gerade für die Landwirtschaft sollten aber neben diesen explizit auf Lieferketten bezogenen Ansät­zen auch die Handels-, Investitionsschutz- und Agrar­politik der Europäischen Union (EU) ver­bessert werden. Nur das Zusammenspiel aller Ansätze kann landwirtschaftliche Liefer­ket­ten so beeinflussen, dass die speziellen Nachhaltigkeits­probleme dieses Sektors be­rück­sichtigt werden. Schließ­lich wirken übliche ­Ansätze, die Lieferketten isoliert be­trach­ten, lediglich in Richtung des Importstroms in die EU. Damit nehmen sie Ent­wick­lungsländer nur in ihrer traditionellen Rolle als Zulieferer von Agrarrohstoffen wahr und blenden Optio­nen für mehr eigene Wertschöpfung und künftige Entwicklung aus. (Autorenreferat