June 2012

Leveraging Services Trade Liberalisation for Enhanced Food Security in SADC

This paper examines the potential role of trade liberalization to enhance food security in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). The author argues that it is clear that the services sector plays a significant, yet underestimated, role in the agricultural sector in the SADC and that opening up the service sector to regional competition could improve those services, leading in turn to improvements in agricultural productivity. However, negotiations have not progressed very far. This can partly be explained by the lack of research on the extraneous factors that are fundamental to agricultural development, such as the linkages between services trade and agricultural productivity and supply, which ultimately impacts upon food security in the region.

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