Investigating alternative poultry trade policies in the context of African Countries: evidence from Ghana

This paper analyses the potential effects of alternative trade policies and the 2020 partial ban on Ghanaian poultry trade and production. Due to the growing support for a total ban on poultry imports by various value chain actors, the paper also investigates the impact of a complete ban on Ghana's poultry imports. To account for the spillover effects, we apply a novel integrated method covering a modified General Equilibrium model and typical farm analysis and create a baseline according to the latest versions of the EU-Ghana Economic Partnership Agreement adopted in December 2020. Our findings show that the partial ban has a lower effect on trade, while it has larger negative effects on the whole economy compared with the total ban. The effect of expanding tariff escalation either through changing the tariff rates of the final product or abolishing the tariffs on feed products is small in our case. However, increasing the tariff rate of the final product to the maximum level of bound tariff, i.e. 99%, has a higher effect on the value chain compared with abolishing the tariff rate of feed products. The farm-level analysis reveals that mainly large-scale integrated farms in Ghana benefit from increases in domestic production due to tariff increases or a total ban.