Review by Jorge Luis Barrera Vega. May 30, 2025
Organized by the OECD and launched on May 21, this webinar served as a speaking session between representatives from Western African countries that made up the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to discuss the current state of food trade within the economic bloc, between ECOWAS and the rest of the world, and the role of research on this topic. Representatives from the OECD and organizations affiliated with ECOWAS were invited to act as speakers and share their point of view, particularly on the role of updated data in improving research on food trade, and how it can relate to better policies within each member state and for the economic bloc as a whole. A topic of particular concern was unrecorded African trade, representing data that escaped national customs organizations, and therefore, one of the main sources for data used by researchers affiliated with ECOWAS. Alban Mas Aparisi, Economist for the Food Systems Transformation team and part of the OECD/SWAC Secretariat, explained that when unrecorded data was incorporated in the analysis, the
values of intra-regional food trade in billions of dollars between 2014 and 2022 could double or even surpass by six times the original value based on recorded data for agriculture and food; this gap is especially relevant for the analysis of imports within ECOWAS, with the unrecorded USD 1.5 billion for Nigeria and USD 290 million for Guinea in 2014 surpassing the recorded USD 200 million and USD 51
million, respectively. Comparing updated intra-regional trade data with data on extra-regional trade by 2024, the research by Aparisi found that most exports from ECOWAS states (except cocoa and cashew nuts), and up to 38% of trade, took place within the region, and a good portion of trade for ECOWAS countries had non-border states as partners. Due to all these findings, there was a strong argument in seeing the ECOWAS region and its members as responsible for ensuring food security in West African countries, including non-affiliated ones, and any significant improvement made on intra-regional trade can improve regional trade as a whole.
With that said, what about the regional policies on food trade? Alain Sy Traoré, Kolawole Sofola, and Ousseynou Ngom all agreed on the relevance of updated data on food trade and the need of coordination between agri-systems and trade systems to advance this goal, but each has their own take on the issue of policies. Sofola spoke about investment in data systems with a focus on agriculture and cross-border trade systems, using this data as leverage to support regional trade and ensure food security amongst ECOWAS members. Traoré warned about a trend in policymaking of relying on assumptions and intuition to compensate for holes in data, and argued in favor of enhancing regional
integration and cooperation to complement national statistical systems with regional efforts combining public and private sectors. Ngom explained that the divide between data and policymaking is linked to diverging priorities between policymakers and researchers that make it harder to build trust and consistent coordination, with the former concerned about short-term pressures from their national constituencies and the latter driven by academic rigor and accuracy. Cooperation, however, is possible, and efforts must continue towards improved data surveys and analysis on ECOWAS’ food trade dynamics and policies.
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L.M.
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Livhuwani Mutheiwana, Press Officer at the International Association for Political Science Students (e: press@iapss.org).
Jorge Luis Barrera Vega, Press Officer at the International Association for Political Science Students (e: comms@iapss.org).
Leonardo Lucchesi, VP and Head of Public Relations at the International Association for Political Science Students (e: publicrelations@iapss.org)
