Comparative advantage study, 3nd progress report. CIRAD's International expert mission (26 March-09 April 2004) : Assistance for capacity building through enhancing operation of the National agricultural policy center, FAO projects GCP/SYR/006/ITA and TCP/SYR/2906 (A)

The National Agricultural Policy Centre (NAPC) has decided to assess the comparative advantages of the Syrian Agricultural products in a systematic way, with the technical and financial support of FAO. To this end, a pilot study, entitled the Comparative Advantage Study (CAS), has been designed to initiate the process with two major objectives: a) To assess the comparative advantages through the application of the Policy Analysis Matrix (PAM) to selected commodities in order to provide a first set of analysis to decision makers. b) To build within NAPC the required expertise to further expands the application of the PAM to other relevant Commodity Chains and to update results from the CAS. The CAS is directly implemented by a team of six NAPC staffs under the supervision of NAPC director and FAO Chief Technical Advisor of Project GCP/SYR/006/ITA. The CIRAD's international experts provide technical and methodological backstopping for information and data collection, data analysis, reporting dissemination and discussion of the CAS results. The CIRAD's international experts will also set up a mechanism (tools and method) to further expand the analysis of the comparative advantages of the Syrian agriculture in a systematic way and to use the information collected to measure the standard indicators of supports to the agriculture (Producers/Consumers Support Estimate and the Aggregate Measure of Support) The CAS also benefits from the assistance of National Consultants recruited by FAO to assist in secondary data collection and to discuss the results of the PAMs. The CAS will also make use of farm level data collected by the Farming System Study (FSS) concurrently implemented by the NAPC with the technical and financial support of the FAO. This report presents the outputs of 3rd mission carried out from March 26 until December 9 by one CIRAD's international expert to NAPC in Damascus (Syria). (Résumé d'auteur)