Foreign trade information system: A useful tool for development

Imagine you grow blueberries and want to export your produce to a neighboring country. How much profit can you hope to make? Are there any trade agreements in place between the two countries? What rules and tariffs already exist? Imagine you’re a government official in charge of trade negotiations with other countries or a researcher doing trade policy analysis. Where could you find information about existing trade agreements and how certain trade agreements came into place?

Today, countries around the world are trading with each other as never before. Over the past quarter century, many countries have liberalized their economic and trade policies and opened their markets to the world. For many of them, international trade has become a roaring engine for local development. More and more, countries’ economies have become dependent on trade to continue their trajectories of growth.

These are among the reasons trade-related information has become increasingly important and sought after by those in the public and private sectors involved in all aspects of international trade. It’s also why the Organization of American States (OAS) has come to play a central role in making that information available to people around the world, but especially to its Member States.

Through its Executive Secretariat for Integral Development, the OAS has developed over the past 15 years a broad online database of trade-related resources that provides one-stop shopping to anyone seeking information on any aspect of international trade involving countries of the Americas—multilateral agreements, customs unions, free trade agreements, background and negotiating history of agreements in force, trade-related news and other resources. The online database is known as the OAS Foreign Trade Information System, or SICE, for its acronym in Spanish, and it can be found at www.sice.oas.org.

SICE was established in 1995 with the goal of disseminating information through the Internet on trade in the Americas and between countries of the hemisphere and others by centralizing public documents such as trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties. The SICE website contains more than 18,000 documents and files related to foreign trade in English and Spanish. It centralizes official public trade-related documents from a variety of sources and offers trade negotiators, entrepreneurs, researchers and other civil society actors easy access to the texts, annexes and related documents of trade and investment agreements signed by OAS Member States, as well as to other trade-related information in the Western Hemisphere.

Use of the SICE website has grown dramatically since its creation. In 2009, the website was visited 2.5 million times—that’s some 7,000 visits every day, a hundredfold increase since 1996. The size of the website has grown fourfold. Moreover, SICE’s reputation as a reliable and precise source of information may be evidenced by references to SICE in various free trade agreements as well as in national and international websites, including the United States Department of State, the United States Federal Trade Commission, the World Bank Law Resource Center, the North American Free Trade Agreement Commission for Labor Cooperation, the World Trade Organization and others.

Based at OAS headquarters in Washington, D.C., SICE is managed by a small team of OAS staff members and consultants who are entrusted with the daily updating of the site and charged with seeking new trade-related information from OAS Member States. One of their priorities has always been to make the site user-friendly and easy to navigate. Funding for SICE comes from the OAS Regular Fund and contributions from the United States Department of State.

Foreign trade has become of fundamental importance to countries around the world. In the Americas, the proportion of foreign trade in the gross domestic product (GDP) of many countries is about 50 percent. As nations continue to expand trade with new and old partners, trade-centered information will be invaluable to all actors involved.

At the OAS, SICE has become a good example of a modest-budget program of Inter-American coordination that is in sync with the goals and mission of the Organization, focused on bringing together the countries of the hemisphere, providing opportunities for cooperation and creating possibilities for dialogue.

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