Assessing the Impacts of Organic Equivalency Agreements on the U.S. Organic Trade

Organic Equivalency Arrangements (OEAs) are designed to reduce certification barriers and facilitate trade in organic products, yet existing studies reach conflicting conclusions regarding their effectiveness. We argue that this disagreement stems from differences in counterfactual construction. Using U.S. export data for organic and conventional products from 2011 to 2025, we first estimate organic-only difference-in-differences models and then introduce a tripledifference design that compares organic and conventional exports within the same productdestination markets. The organic-only specification implies large negative or null effects of OEAs on U.S. organic exports, even after accounting for staggered treatment timing. In contrast, the triple-difference specification yields a positive and statistically significant effect, indicating that organic exports increase relative to comparable conventional exports following equivalency arrangements. Robustness tests show that this sign reversal is not driven by any single agreement and persists when the estimation sample is held constant. An examination of the European Union, the most studied OEA reveals that organic and conventional exports declined together, suggesting that organic-only estimators confound certification effects with broader destination-wide trade shocks. The results demonstrate that estimated OEA effects are highly sensitive to counterfactual construction and highlight the importance of within-market controls when evaluating certification-based trade policies.