Despite the variation, every subgroup within developing countries has increasing trade intensities. This implies that agricultural trade is playing a more important role, and agricultural self-sufficiency is losing out.

# **V. Disaggregated Export Performance**

To get an accurate sense of changes in trade, it is important to measure the contributions of different product groups to those changes. Many analysts argue that the markets for traditional exports to industrial countries are static because of both low income elasticities and product substitution. For example, coffee and tea have been partially displaced by soft drinks, cotton by synthetic fibers, and sugar by high-fructose corn syrup.

One problem in analyzing the performance of detailed product groups is the absence of disaggregated price series to deflate the nominal trade data. The price series are not consistent with the trade categories so the disaggregated flows discussed in this section are based on nominal trade data. This forces us to use nominal values and changes in these values over time. Thus it is not possible to separate the price and quantity changes for agricultural product subgroups.<sup>13</sup> To examine the detailed trade flows, agricultural products were separated into four groups. One group consists mainly of developing country tropical products, such as coffee, cocoa, tea, nuts, spices, textile fibers (mostly cotton), and sugar and confectionary products. A second is made up of highly protected temperate zone products of industrial countries, such as meats, milk and milk products, grains, animal feed, and edible oil and oilseeds. A third category consists of dynamic nontraditional products, such as seafood, fruits, vegetables, and cut flowers, for which global protection rates are lower. A fourth group consists of other products, including processed agricultural products such as tobacco and cigarettes, beverages, other processed foods, and agricultural raw materials such as hides and skins, crude rubber, wood products etc. Exports of these products are further separated into exports from developing countries, exports from industrial countries, and world exports. World exports show how the world trade has evolved, and which product groups are increasing or reducing their market shares in world trade.

Table 10 shows the disaggregated structure of world exports, where each cell is expressed as a percentage of world exports. Table10 clearly shows that the structure of world trade in agriculture has only changed marginally over the last two decades. Fruits and vegetables, which as a subgroup have the largest share of world exports at 14 percent and were growing rapidly during the 1980s, have stagnated. Other products such as alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, at almost 7 percent of world exports, have increased. Temperate food product trade has increased more than other groups. Especially the trade in grains has expanded more rapidly than others. Other two items that have somewhat increased their shares are beverages, and processed foods. We will analyze processed food issues in the next section.

> 13 There are unit value indexes from the trade data but these are not consistent or reliable.

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