Paving the road to Sustainable Trade and Development in Agriculture

STRADA aims at supporting the design of EU trade policies in accordance with European sustainability objectives and global
environmental challenges, and with consideration of other countries’ development objectives. To this end, STRADA will
design novel tools, indicators and analysis, but also enhance the dialogue across diverse stakeholders with different
approaches to agricultural trade sustainability.
STRADA will improve trade dialogue by providing: 1) sound evidence on the impacts of EU agricultural trade on related SDG
targets, 2) tools to assess quantitatively these impacts from future trade-policy changes, and 3) policy guidance to
modernize EU trade policies and agreements, increasing policy coherence. In particular, STRADA will fill knowledge gaps as
regards the social and environmental impacts of agricultural trade and trade policies in the EU and in African, South-Asian
and South-American countries, based on detailed ex-post evidence.
The core contribution will be the development of a coherent modelling toolbox for assessing ex-ante sustainability impacts
for future trade policies, enabling the Sustainability Impact Assessments of EU trade agreements to include a
comprehensive SDG assessment. STRADA will propose trade options building on ex-post evidence, stakeholder
engagement, and legal analysis of Trade and Sustainable Development provisions and Carbon Border Adjustment
feasibility, quantify ex-ante the resulting sustainability outcomes on the SDGs, highlighting trade-offs, and provide guidance
to policy coherence.
To achieve these ambitious objectives, STRADA brings together interdisciplinary expertise, spanning economists,
econometricians, simulation modellers, political scientists, and legal experts that have the ambition to go beyond state-ofthe-
art research, in order to “pave the road” to more sustainable and inclusive trade.