Technical measures and agri-food trade between traditional economic partners: emerging issues from the EU-Africa trade relations

Purpose Africa's exports to the EU markets have been plummeting, which in part has been attributed to the applied technical measures that impact Africa's sustainable economic development. However, the trade measures have stimulated the EU food export base to Africa. The intensiveness and extensiveness of the EU technical measures have a double-edged impact on Africa's food system competitiveness. Thus, this study investigates Africa's cocoa, coffee and vegetable export effects of the EU technical measures. Design/methodology/approach The empirical strategy adopts an augmented gravity model derived from Melitz's firm heterogeneous framework that measures the extent to which the exporting trade costs, such as the technical measures, affect the heterogeneous exporting firms' market access. Findings The findings suggest contrary outputs to the dominant contextual perspective that the EU trade policies adversely impact Africa's agri-food trade competitiveness. This study proposes extensive investments in food system-related quality infrastructure and improved development finance to propel the sustainable transformation of the food system. Research limitations/implications This study is limited to technical measures of the agri-food trade. Further studies could evaluate other trade policy measures. Originality/value This article contributes to the frontier of knowledge with the extension and update to the study that has investigated these selected agri-food effects of the EU food safety regulations by exploring the combined effects of sanitary and phytosanitary measures and the technical barriers to trade. It also utilises the unexplored technical measures data in an augmented gravity model derived from the Melitz theoretical framework. Moreover, this study departs from the previous country-specific studies by exploring panel data and updating the technical measures dataset for a combined 37 African countries that export vegetables, coffee and cocoa to the EU.