Evidence of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures on Africa’s Agricultural Trade: The Case of Coffee Exports from Cameroon to the OECD

Africa’s destiny hinges on accessing the lucrative markets in the northern hemisphere. However, non-tariff measures in particular sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures have become a prominent tool in the regulation of international trade in agricultural and food products and have been increasingly recognized as one of the major determinants of market access, particularly to the European Union. However, there is very limited empirical evidence on the impact of sanitary and phytosanitary measures on Africa and Cameroon’s agricultural exports. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the impact of changes in sanitary and phytosanitary measures in importing countries on coffee exports from Cameroon at the 6-digit HS level, using the gravity model and the modified Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimators. The analysis is based on trade data between Cameroon and 10 major importing countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) between 2001 and 2020. These results suggest that coffee export from Cameroon is not significantly affected or influenced by sanitary and phytosanitary measures in major importing markets; that is, the standards had weak trade effects on coffee exports. Other factors such as income, language, and labor size were significant in influencing trade flows in the export commodities. These results further point to the low productive capacity of the country’s coffee sub-sector. The supply-side constraints in the coffee sub-sector can be addressed by the government by improving access to high-yield coffee varieties by farmers, educating and training farmers on good agricultural practices through agricultural extension programs, and upgrading the market infrastructure.