MCDA Final Report Malawi - Standards and Trade Development ...

Executive summary
As part of efforts to establish more coherent and accountable decisions in the allocation of scarce
resources towards competing Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) capacity-building needs the use of multicriteria
decision analysis (MCDA) is advocated as a structured framework for making the costs and
benefits of alternative capacity-building investments explicit and for identifying options that offer the
greatest return. Because the lack of data can seriously impede such analyses the Standards and Trade
Development Facility (STDF) has supported the development of MCDA which enables SPS capacitybuilding
options to be prioritized on the basis of a wide range of decision criteria.
This report has presented the initial results of a priority-setting exercise for SPS capacity-building in
Malawi which commenced on Wednesday 8th February 2012. In this case, 16 distinct SPS capacitybuilding
options were eventually identified and prioritized on the basis of a series of decision criteria to
which weights are applied, that were derived by further consultation with stakeholders. The end result
is a clear ranking of the 16 capacity-building options, which appear relatively robust to changes in the
weights attached to the decision criteria and to changes in the decision criteria applied, including
analyses where the analytical focus was exclusively on the trade impacts. Of the 16 options in the
analysis the following four are consistently ranked as high priority:
Pesticide controls for tea.
Compliance with SPS requirements for chilli sauce exports.
Virus indexing capacity for planting material.
Aflatoxin controls for groundnuts.
Conversely, certain capacity-building options are consistently ranked as low priority, notably:
Pesticide residue testing capacity.
Pesticide controls for maize.
Animal health controls for day old chicks.
The ranking of aflatoxin controls for maize is highly sensitive to assumptions over trade impacts and is
examined in more detail. This prioritization is based not only on the respective costs and predicted
trade impacts, but also on the basis of impacts on agricultural productivity, domestic public health, local
environmental protection, poverty and vulnerable groups i.e. encompassing many of the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future indicators. Given the robustness of the
results, this basic ranking would appear to present a coherent basis on which to start defining a national
action plan for SPS capacity-building in Malawi.
It is important to recognize, however, that the results of the analysis presented above represent just the
starting point in the use of the priority-setting framework in the context of SPS capacity-building in
Malawi. Indeed, the results must be revisited and revised on an ongoing basis in the light of
improvements in the availability and/or quality of data, changes in policy priorities that imply shifts in
the decision weights and/or the introduction of new decision criteria, and as investments are made in
the options included in the analysis above, these can be excluded and the priorities estimated
accordingly.
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