The paper was been prepared for a High Level Meeting on "Regional Programs for Food Security: Towards Sustainable Food Security and Poverty Alleviation" convened jointly by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during the period 8-9 October 2003. It paper tries to develop a conceptual framework that links national strategies and RPFS in the Near East (NE) Region. The paper's main objective is to highlight the issues pertaining to the interrelationship between national with regional strategies/policies through the review of policy considerations for different types of links (the direct and indirect ones), including criteria for considering regional and/or multi-country programs and projects.

Regional Integration: Concepts and Experiences

The growing interest in regional integration is not based on trade motives alone given that tariff levels in most regions have been falling and are now at relatively low levels. All successful regional groupings have objectives other than freeing trade, and that this may be essential for the will to evolve. In many instances, trade may well be secondary to political or security objectives or a tool rather than an objective: it is difficult to find any groups which have only a strictly trade agenda. However, with growing propensity of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs), it is still of great relevance to appreciate the emerging new concepts and trends on the gains from integrating services of trade and from regulatory integration.

The past experience of developing countries with regional integration schemes is not positive. Preferential trade arrangements give rise both to trade creation and trade diversion effects, as well as to transfers between the member countries. The design of RTAs among developing countries in the past tended to maximize the costs of trade diversion (because of high external tariffs) and also encouraged regressive transfers from poorer to better-off members of such arrangements. The recent more favourable assessment of regional integration arrangements involving developing countries is based on the following considerations: Regionalism will lead to net trade creation as long as it is coupled with a significant degree of trade liberalization and where emphasis is put on reducing cost-creating trade barriers which simply waste resources. Regional economic integration may be a precondition for, rather than an obstacle to, integrating developing countries into the world economy by minimizing the costs of market fragmentation.

Regional Economic Organizations and Regional Agricultural Trade in the Near East

The Near East countries have been parties to a plethora of RTAs, principally involving preferential trading arrangements. The vast majority of these agreements are among Arab countries. The major RTAs in the Near East include the Agreement for Facilitation and Promotion of Intra-Arab Trade, the Council for Arab Economic Unity (CAEU), the Economic Co-operation Organisation (ECO), the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU). All these groupings have in common the objective of promoting intra-regional agricultural trade and co-operation among member countries. Despite all these agreements, the performance of intra-regional trade, including agricultural trade, remained low and stagnant. The salient features of the overall regional agricultural trade include the following:

The share of intra-regional agricultural trade in total agricultural trade in the NE is stagnant at the 8-10% range and the region is becoming increasingly dependent on world market for its food supplies.
High geographical concentration at the level of a few partners. Algeria, for instance, is Tunisia's most important partner within the region for both exports and imports. Oman, on the other hand, imported around 80% of its regional agricultural products from two neighbouring countries, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
High commodity concentration, with live animals, meat, fish and fish products predominantly directed to regional markets, while vegetables, fruits and agricultural raw materials such as cotton reveal a clear extra-regional orientation.

Therefore, the impact of existing RTAs on intra-regional trade in the NE, despite the many provisions offered for the removal of trade barriers among member countries, was limited and marginal. The present regional economic co-operation mechanisms might be necessary but not sufficient devices for the expansion of intra-regional trade and therefore any liberalization efforts per se would have little effect on intra-regional trade.

Food Security in the Context of Regional Integration

Food security is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Food security will be affected by international trade in general and agricultural trade in particular. Increased intra-regional agricultural trade could also promote food security in the following ways: (a) the increased intra-regional trade fosters economic growth and increases employment prospects and the income-earning capacities of the poor; it will enhance access to food. Whether regional integration promotes overall economic growth or not will depend on the design of the agreement, and whether it succeeds in promoting more trade creation rather than trade diversion; (b) by augmenting domestic food supplies to meet consumption needs; and (c) by reducing overall food supply variability.

For intra-regional agricultural trade to impact positively on food security, barriers to such trade must first be reduced or eliminated. Trade facilitation measures which can be taken on an inter-governmental basis (improved information on market opportunities, reduced frontier formalities, recognition of the mutual equivalence of SPS controls, etc.) are important in this context. Improved physical infrastructure for transport, communications and payments between members of a regional grouping is paramount, in countries where inadequate infrastructure (land locked countries like Kazakhstan) remains a huge constraint to increasing intra-regional trade. Finally, trade policy barriers arising from differences in the stance of domestic agricultural policies will need to be addressed.

FAO Initiative on Regional Programmes for Food Security

In an effort to intensify its co-operation with REOs, FAO has collaborated with many REOs in the formulation of the Regional Strategies for Food Security (RSFS) and the follow-up Regional Programmes for Food Security (RPFS). The Regional Strategies are based on the key policy recommendations of the "National Agricultural Development Strategies - Horizon 2010" prepared by individual countries, as a follow-up recommendation of the WFS in 1996. They identify areas requiring investment and technical support for agricultural development and food security, including the national Special Program for Food Security in those countries where it is operative.

A typical RPFS consists of three components:

Trade facilitation
Harmonization of national agricultural policies
Support to national Special Programmes for Food Security (SPFS)

In the Near East, most countries face major challenges in achieving the desired goals of sustainable agricultural development and food security in-spite of the serious and progressive national efforts. It is evident that trade barriers and lack of common programmes to eliminate the several institutional, political, economic and other constraints, are hindering the expansion of intra-regional trade among the countries of the region and even within the member countries of the existing REOs. Accordingly, there seem to be a need for Regional Programmes to supplement national programmes and to strengthen efforts in areas of common interest, and where collective planning and actions proves to be cost effective and economical.

With technical assistance from FAO, preparations for the formulation of RPFS are currently underway by two REOs from the Near East region, namely the Council of Arab Economic Unity (CAEU) and the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO). Preparations have been recently initiated for the possible formulation of an RPFS for the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU).

Linkages between RPFS and National Strategies

There are two types of linkages: the direct links (policy coordination), and the indirect ones. In turn, the indirect links are divided into functional cooperation and institutional coordination. The direct linkage includes: policy coordination, harmonization of trade policies, common policy decisions, integration of policies, and common strategies/policies. Whereas the functional indirect linkage includes: cooperation in statistics and information systems, education and research, managing common resources, creating river basin and groundwater organizations, and combating common problems like transboundry diseases. The coordination among institutions is required to enable the smooth flow of economic activities among member countries. It represents another indirect type of linkages among member countries' policies/strategies. Fields of institutional cooperation include (but are not necessarily confined to) the changing role of the state, marketing and financial institutions, property rights, regulatory frameworks and institutions governing international dimensions.

Based on the above, most of the countries and the REOs seem to agree on the following as the major areas to spearhead the process of linking regional with national priorities in the Near East:

Facilitation of Intra-regional Trade at regional and sub-regional levels;
Harmonize food safety and trade policies;
Improve marketing and agro-processing facilities including market information and early warning systems;
Larger role of the Private sector in trade facilitation and investment;
Improving marketing and trade information infrastructure;
Management of natural resources with special reference to water management, efficient utilization, and pollution;
Harmonization of agricultural and trade policies among the members countries of the REOs to enhance regional/sub-regional food security and agricultural intra-regional trade;
Enhancing crop and livestock production, productivity and intensification;
Development of range-lands and animal feed production;
Improvement of the plant protection and animal health quarantines and facilities/institutions;
Improving fisheries and aquaculture sectors;
Bio-diversity and Forestry development; and
The accession to the WTO and its implications for internal policy reform.

The following Priorities are also crucial to some countries:

Diversification of farm production and technology transfer at the farm levels;
Improve rural finance system and institutions;
Improving land distribution and property rights regulations and implementation;
Development of the livestock and poultry sectors;
Human development and capacity building for farmers, extension specialists, civil societies practitioners, and policy analysts;
Strengthening the role of women in sustainable rural and agricultural development; and
Enhancing off-farm income generation schemes.

In conclusion and in order to identify a regional initiative for a REO to be implemented at a regional level, such initiative should take into consideration the following:

Actions should be taken to promote intra-regional trade between countries in the Near East Region. These include: improving transport and marketing infrastructure to reduce costs and increase trade flows, taking into account the needs of landlocked countries and transit neighbours; opening up of regional agricultural markets including removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers; promoting networking between enterprises at national and regional levels to help them act in groups through sharing of information and co-operation in the design, production, marketing and provision of inter-state services; developing export standards and infrastructures and securing greater coordination among NE countries in general and within and between existing sub-regional groupings; developing and strengthening regional information networks for the provision of timely information and statistics on regional trade and investment opportunities; and removing procedural and institutional bottlenecks that increase transaction costs, including through efforts to improve efficiency, efficacy and transparency by the implementation of trade facilitation measures and improving standards and quality control.
The formulation of regional Programme should follow the "programme approach", which recognises the interrelationship among the different agricultural activities and sub-sectors. To facilitate adoption of a programme approach, the after reviewing the Governments priorities and the identified project profiles in the different sub-sectors and identifying priority regional projects in those sub-sectors, should arranged the selected priority projects in a thematic order that observed the integration of women development for poverty alleviation, improved household food security and greater gender equity and that encompass linkages between the major priority areas identified in section 5.3.
The suggested regional programme for food security should be grounded on high leverage bottom-up and grass root participation particularly of producers and their associations as well as other private sector agents and NGOs with special emphasis on getting active participation from women's groups and associations. These programme/projects should also be integrative and multidisciplinary to ensure sustainability and equity. Their focus is on expanding production of staple foods in high potential areas through development of water management and irrigation potential and conservation of natural resource base, and through vertical expansion of production through increased yields, conducive economic environment, and export promotion of commodities in which the country has comparative advantage.
Emphasise should be given to assistance to the efforts of the Government through policy advice and support in the areas of privatisation and private sector development, and through assistance in the management of the reform process (policy formulation, implementation and monitoring).
The agricultural sector, as the prime mover of the most of the Region's economies, has to make immediate structural changes to adjust to these new economic, institutional and governance realities.
Emphasis should be given to conservation and optimum utilisation of the natural resources through an integrated and participatory approach to sustainable management of natural resources.
Weight should be given to post-production activities which emerged as second generation problems for sustained development of the agricultural sector and to qualitative improvement in production in addition to quantitative change.

National Strategies and Regional Programmes for Food Securitywithin the Context of Economic Integration in the Near East

Executive Summary

Regional Integration: Concepts and Experiences

Regional Economic Organizations and Regional Agricultural Trade in the Near East

Food Security in the Context of Regional Integration

FAO Initiative on Regional Programmes for Food Security

Linkages between RPFS and National Strategies

National Strategies and Regional Programmes for Food Security
within the Context of Economic Integration in the Near East