Agriculture Market Access Database, AMAD: a cooperative effort to disseminate information

Accurate information is essential in order to make correct decisions in the agriculture market and to enable research on market access conditions in the international agriculture and food sectors.

By having this in mind, several international, bilateral and governmental agencies combined efforts to create a database with agriculture market information of some 50 countries. This online database can be found by visiting www.amad.org

This joint initiative was launched in 1999 by the Agriculture and AgriFood Canada, EU Commission - Agriculture Directorate-General, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Bank, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the United States Department of Agriculture - Economic Research Service.

Countries included in the AMAD database are member economies of the World Trade Organization that scheduled tariff rate quotas (TRQ) as well as the additional members that listed tariff commitments on a tariff line basis in their Uruguay Round schedules.

The sources of the information published in this database are the WTO Secretariat, national sources, FAO database of Supply and Utilization Account, applied tariffs from UNCTAD TRAINS and Trade data from UN Trade Data System. The information that can be found in this database includes:

Tariff rate quotas

Scheduled Most Favoured Nation (MFN) tariff rates

Indication of Special Safeguard Measures application

Notified imports under TRQs

Tariff Rate Quotas country allocations

Import volume and value

Applied tariffs

World reference prices

Exchange rates

AMAD includes a self-study guide that can be downloaded from the website presenting step-by-step examples of several common data retrieval and aggregation exercises that can be performed with the data.

For more information about the database please write to:contact@amad.org