Trade and Environment Briefings: Export Restrictions - Policy Brief

This document analyzes governments’ use of export restrictions to manage access to natural resources and to pursue goals including food security, industrial development, environmental protection, and conservation. It describes instruments such as export duties, quotas, licensing, minimum export prices, dual pricing, and prohibitions, noting their strongest global effects when a few producers control supply. Reported benefits include stabilizing domestic prices, supporting downstream processing in sectors like timber, fisheries, and leather, and tempering environmentally damaging extraction, but these measures can amplify international price spikes and volatility. The brief highlights risks to food-deficit importers, frictions over minerals and rare earths, and weak WTO disciplines, illustrated by disputes concerning China.