Latest content: Trade and economy

This Handbook on Extractive Sector Investment Negotiations, which is aimed at developing country officials, is intended as a guide for teams involved in negotiations with foreign investors to ensure that processes are designed and followed to achieve positive, sustainable outcomes that produce ‘win-win’ results.

This handbook attempts to bring a holistic approach to such negotiations, which includes a multidisciplinary approach through the involvement of all relevant stakeholders.

The Think Trade, Think Green: Commonwealth Innovative Youth Essay Award has been launched by the Trade Competitiveness Section and the Commonwealth Youth Programme as part of activities planned for the 2024 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Apia, Samoa. The 56 Commonwealth member countries have a combined population of 2.7 billion people, with over 60 per cent aged between 15 and 29. The role of young people as agents of positive change and creators of innovative projects in their communities and countries is increasingly recognised as they contribute to finding solutions to the myriad challenges facing our world.

The world is significantly off-track in terms of achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2 on zero hunger by 2030. Eliminating hunger, ensuring food security and promoting healthy diets and better nutrition through the development of sustainable food systems are priorities for Commonwealth member countries. This 2024 edition of the Commonwealth Trade Review explores how trade, investment and resilient supply chains can bolster food security for the Commonwealth’s 2.7 billion people.

This report analyses how international trade in general, and agriculture trade in particular, can be mobilised to raise agricultural productivity, promote access to nutritious food and sustainably facilitate trade in agricultural commodities, and offers policy recommendations to support agricultural trade to achieve these ends.

Advancements in blockchain and distributed ledger technology have had a revolutionary impact across many sectors, particularly finance. With these technologies likely to play ever more prominent roles in our economies, this Model Law for Virtual Assets provides Commonwealth member countries with a regulatory framework that will give much-needed legislative clarity to financial markets and vital protection to customers.

Data could be the conduit for boosting intra-Commonwealth trade and investment as enshrined in the ‘Declaration on the Commonwealth Connectivity Agenda for Trade and Investment’. The sharing of data according to the Open Data Institute (ODI), can create social and economic value for people, organisations, and the wider economy. Ensuring data sovereignty including maintaining a secure, trusted data environment, governments have an important role to play in laying the foundations for a flourishing data-driven economy by pursuing policies that improve the flow of data and ensuring that companies who want to innovate have appropriate access to high-quality and well-maintained data.

Ghana is well positioned to tap into the potential of digitalisation across its agriculture sector. A multi-stakeholder dialogue with representatives from the sector, including digital agricultural services providers, confirmed that numerous organisations were already engaged in agricultural data management. Participants identified and shared experiences of several well-established systems and platforms for data management already operational in the country. However, they also described fragmented databases, an unwillingness to share data, operational inefficiencies, data collection fatigue, unsuited policies based on unreliable data and a data power imbalance.