The 2020 Africa Agriculture Trade Monitor, the third in this series of flagship reports, presents an overview of trade in agriculture products in Africa and highlights the main impediments that affect intra- and extra-African trade.

International trade in goods is expected to continue its nosedive in the coming months as economies struggle to recover from lockdown measures used to slow the COVID-19 outbreak.

In 2019 and the early months of 2020, global trade faced two major albeit very different shocks, namely the United States-China trade war and the cascading response of the countries around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As countries adopt radical measures to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control, international trade and transport systems are under tremendous stress. Early evidence shows that international trade is collapsing, threatening access to goods and critical supplies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought considerable attention to trade in medical products, and specifically trade in products for prevention, testing and treatment.

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has brought the link between zoonotic diseases – those transmitted from animals to humans – and wildlife markets into sharp focus.

As governments and businesses grapple with the effects of COVID-19, other global challenges remain. Once the immediate crisis abates, countries must intensify environmental action to tackle climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, even while restarting their economies. Trade policy has a vital role to play.

It is claimed that the world food supplies are more stable than the domestic supplies, and therefore free trade should achieve a higher degree of stability in prices and consumption than autarkic policies. The risk sharing implicit in such an argument, has, however never been formally examined.

The global economy has suffered a significant slowdown amid prolonged trade disputes and wide-ranging policy uncertainties.

Many regional trade agreements (RTAs) contain chapters and articles that are environmentally specific. But Parties can elect to more broadly incorporate environmental objectives in their RTAs to promote their environmental concerns in such agreements.