Market Access for Agricultural Commodities from Mekong Sub-region Countries to China: Case of Cambodia

Project Objective

The study has the following specific objectives.

• Review China’s trade policies and regulations on agricultural products, in overall and specifically for Cambodia.
• Identify enabling conditions and challenges imposed by these policies/regulations for Cambodia, including tariff- and non-tariff measures.
• Draw a value chain of selected fruits (i.e., bananas and mangos) and identify challenges faced by different actors across respective fruit value chains in both production and export.
• Draw and recommend possible policy solutions to promote selected fruits’ value chain and export to China.

Project Description

Agriculture remains significant for Cambodia’s economic growth, although the share of GDP and employment has declined in recent years. ​Agricultural export value has increased from 566 million USD in 2016 to 1,693 million USD in 2021, making its share of total exports​reach 9.64 percent in 2021. China has been one of the main exporting destinations for Cambodia’s agricultural products, especially​with the current effort to promote trade through various Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Among all the agricultural products​​ exported, fruits are the commodities having received high attention; and to date, mangos, bananas, and longans can be exported directly to China. It seems through FTAs between the two countries—Cambodia and China—that tariff barriers are significantly eased as around 90 percent of all the tariff lines, including that of fruits, are eligible for zero-percent import tariff rate.

Agricultural value chain has often been examined in Cambodia to understand the governance and interactions among actors as well as economic benefits distribution. Combining value chain with export market access, however, has not been widely studied. The aim of this study is to provide better understanding on market access to China for Cambodian fruits, especially bananas and mangos—the two main exporting fruits to China, through value chain analysis, and to provide policy recommendations, thereafter, for improved access through tariff and non-tariff measures.