Effect of international trade relations on agri-food trade

Abstract

Nowadays, production of goods increases hugely all over the world, resulting an enormous increasing in international trade. Trade in industrial goods grows at a large rate due to trade liberalization, while agriculture is one of the most vulnerable sectors all over the world. However, barriers of agri-food trade were reduced or eliminated; there are still many obstacles to the totally free trade of agricultural products (e.g. restrictions, safeguards, bans, limitations, etc), especially in the European Union. Besides the WTO’s liberalization pressure and its multilateral negotiations, there are a lot of countries that have signed bilateral agreements. In this study, it was examined, what kind of bilateral agreements were entered into force by the EU and how was international agri-food trade influenced by these bilateral agreements as well as by restrict measures. For this, secondary data were analyzed by different statistical methods and the effect of trade measures was characterized by using this results. From the results it can be concluded that EU has preferred different agreements with the various country groups as well as EU has applied different kind of agreements in different eras. The EU’s average growth rate of food trade and average share of food trade is highly variable by partner countries. Bilateral agreements have not always caused trade growth between the two partner regions. The EU’s restrict measurements effect the EU’s foreign trade, because these restrictions are applied to meat products and these commodities are imported the less in the EU.