The OECD database on Export Restrictions on Staple Crops gathers information on export restrictive measures on four key staple crops: wheat, maize, rice and soybeans.
Data is gathered from official legal documents, government websites, and other reliable sources. Only policies that have been implemented or officially announced in a legal document have been incorporated.
Information on export restrictions has been collected since 2007 and is updated annually. The updating process begins with a verification as to whether past policies remain valid, have been terminated, or replaced by new policies. This process guarantees that the evolution of export restrictions can be traced over time.
This database is an OECD contribution to the G20 Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) initiative. It covers AMIS countries, which include G20 members, permanent guests, and eight additional major exporting and importing countries of wheat, maize, rice and soybeans (the AMIS commodities).
The most recent update of the database contains export restrictions introduced between 1 January 2007 and 30 June 2025.
A recent OECD policy paper provides an overview of the export restrictions on staple crops used from January 2007 to April 2024 and gives in-depth descriptions of three periods that experienced an increase in use of these measures, namely the food price crisis of 2007-08, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine.
The OECD Database on Export Restrictions on Staple Crops can be accessed in two versions: the detailed version and the aggregated version. Both versions and other relevant information can be downloaded here.
The detailed version is the complete version of the database; it contains information on each policy measure by HS Code and country, and records a significant amount of additional information, including value of the policy, conditions, exemptions, start and end dates of the policy, date of publication of the legal document, links to the legal document, and pdf versions of those links. The detailed version of the database is particularly useful to understand the timing of policies, their value, and the HS codes that were targeted or exempted. The detailed version can be the basis of in-depth policy briefs that examine for example the evolution of export restrictions in a specific country.
The aggregated version of the database collapses the information from the detailed version to facilitate visual comparisons across time, countries, policies and commodities. The aggregated version is obtained by counting, for each country, the measures with same “commodity class name,” “policy measure name,” “publication date,” “start date,” and “end date” as one. The aggregated version is the basis of the figures below.
For more information about the database fields, how the database has been developed and updated, and how to use the information, please refer to the methodology.
