Peacock Tariff Consulting  |  Trade Policy Brief  |  25 May 2026

In a week when the world’s major economies are still arguing about export controls on fertiliser, baby formula and life‑saving medicines, two small, open economies have quietly doubled down on the opposite bet. Singapore and New Zealand have signed an updated Essential Supply Trade Pact a refreshed and broadened version of the landmark April 2020 declaration that committed both governments to keep critical goods moving, whatever the shock. Six years of Global Trade Alert (GTA) data make clear how unusual that commitment remains.

A small pact with an outsized signal

On Friday, Singapore’s Minister for Trade and Industry and New Zealand’s Minister for Trade and Investment co‑signed an expanded Essential Supply Trade Pact in Singapore, the latest iteration of an agreement first concluded between the two countries in April 2020. The original instrument the Declaration on Trade in Essential Goods for Combating the COVID‑19 Pandemic was the first of its kind: a binding commitment between two World Trade Organization members to keep tariffs at zero and reject export restrictions on a defined list of medical, hygiene, food and agricultural inputs needed during a global health emergency. The refreshed 2026 Pact extends that logic into peacetime, broadening the covered product universe to cover pharmaceuticals, food staples, critical minerals processed for medical use, and the inputs that make all of those things possible.

The news itself is modest. Singapore and New Zealand are not large economies by absolute size: they account for under one per cent of global goods trade between them. But the symbolism is not modest. Since 2020 the two governments have together notified the Global Trade Alert database of 567 discrete trade‑policy interventions 483 by New Zealand and 84 by Singapore of which 318 were classified as liberalising (“Green”), against 243 harmful (“Red”). In a global trade environment where the harmful‑to‑liberalising ratio runs in roughly the opposite direction, that record is striking, and the Pact is the policy frame these two governments use to defend it.

What the Pact actually does

The 2020 declaration set four operative commitments, each of which the 2026 update preserves and expands. First, both countries bind themselves to zero applied tariffs on a list of essential products originally 124 product categories, now 196 in the refreshed instrument. Second, they commit not to impose export restrictions, export taxes, export bans or non‑automatic licensing requirements on any item on that list. Third, they undertake to remove non‑tariff barriers in the relevant supply chains, including by expediting customs processing and accepting each other’s conformity‑assessment results where appropriate. Fourth, and most novel, they pledge to keep air and sea links open for essential cargo even when broader passenger or general‑freight movement is restricted.

The 2026 update layers on three further obligations: a standing review mechanism that meets every twelve months to add or subtract products from the schedule based on stress‑testing the supply chains; a mutual notification obligation that requires either party to give the other ninety days’ advance notice before introducing any measure that could affect an essential supply chain shared between them; and an explicit clause inviting other WTO members to accede on the same terms. That last point matters the original 2020 declaration was joined by Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Myanmar and Uruguay over the 2020–2021 period. The refreshed Pact is structured to make accession easier, in part to anchor the supply‑chain pillar of the broader Indo‑Pacific Economic Framework.

Why now: the global trade backdrop in numbers

To understand why two governments are signing what looks, on its face, like an obvious good‑housekeeping measure, the relevant context is the global use of export‑side trade policy. The Global Trade Alert classifies trade policy interventions across 16 MAST chapters; Chapter P covers export‑related measures, including bans, taxes, licensing requirements, quotas and subsidies. GTA records show that since the start of 2020, governments around the world have notified 5,638 Chapter‑P interventions. Of those, 4,483 just under 80 per cent were assessed as harmful to trading partners. The annual breakdown tracks the political moments of the decade: 863 harmful Chapter‑P interventions in 2020 (the COVID supply‑chain panic), 802 in 2021, 886 in 2022 (the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the food and fertiliser shock), 684 in 2023, 484 in 2024, 567 in 2025 and, in the first five months of 2026, 195 already on the books.

Drilling into the 2020–2021 window the precise period in which Singapore and New Zealand reached for a counter‑example GTA recorded 1,665 harmful export‑side interventions worldwide. The largest single category was trade finance for exporters (667 measures), but the politically loud ones are the headline restrictions: 214 export bans, 156 non‑automatic export licensing requirements, 60 export taxes and 33 export quotas. Export bans alone were implemented by 77 distinct jurisdictions in 2020. The list is geographically diverse: Norway (15 bans), the United Kingdom (11), India (9), Pakistan (6), the Kyrgyz Republic (6), Iran (6), Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Serbia (5 each). Singapore and New Zealand do not appear on the list.

This is not because the two governments were spectators. Singapore is the world’s largest transhipment hub by container throughput; New Zealand is one of the world’s largest exporters of dairy, lamb and infant formula. Both faced, and continue to face, intense domestic political pressure to “secure” essential goods by hoarding them. The pact was, and is, a way of pre‑committing each government against that pressure a Ulysses bind against the next shock.

How the two signatories show up in the data

Singapore’s footprint in the GTA database is small but instructive. Of 84 Singaporean interventions logged since 2020, 20 are classified as Green and 64 as Red. The Red side is dominated by ordinary industrial policy: financial assistance to export‑oriented firms and investment incentives that are harmful only in the narrow GTA sense that they discriminate against foreign competitors. Singapore has notified zero export bans, zero export quotas and only a handful of export‑licensing measures in this six‑year window, almost all of them related to chemical‑weapons precursors or hazardous substances rather than to consumer or medical goods.

The single most telling Singaporean record in the database, for present purposes, runs in the opposite direction. On 2 June 2020 six weeks after signing the original Essential Goods declaration with New Zealand the Singapore Civil Defence Force and the National Environment Agency jointly issued Competent Authorities Circular SCDF/HAZ/13/02/01, abolishing pre‑existing hazardous‑substances export licensing requirements for seven substances, including several azonitrile compounds and isocyanates used in pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing. The intervention is logged as GTA intervention 83743, evaluated Green, and remains in force. The affected jurisdictions are the Philippines and India not Pact signatories which is itself the point: Singapore was prepared to liberalise unilaterally and on an MFN basis, not just on the reciprocal terms it had agreed with Wellington.

New Zealand’s GTA record is larger because Wellington is unusually transparent about publishing tariff concessions, which are individually small but show up as separate entries in the database. The country has notified 483 interventions since 2020. The 2020 year alone produced a stream of “Green” entries with titles that read like a checklist of the original Essential Goods schedule: tariff concessions on ultra‑high‑temperature autoclaves (intervention 84093, December 2020), on combined fish‑oil concentrates used in clinical nutrition (interventions 84276 and 84542, December 2020), on safety footwear used by frontline workers (intervention 82922, October 2020), on electrically heated medical ovens (intervention 81804, October 2020), and on goat‑milk powder used in infant formula (interventions 81801 and 81802, October 2020). New Zealand’s only “Red” Chapter‑P intervention in 2020 was an incentive package for COVID‑affected exporters, not a restriction on outbound flows.

The pattern continued through 2021 (82 interventions), 2022 (97), 2023 (53), 2024 (58) and 2025 (72). The major “Red” New Zealand entries in that span are not protectionist in the traditional sense; they are sanctions packages against Russian entities in the context of the war in Ukraine, including foreign‑customer limits and export bans recorded in February 2022, April 2022, October 2022, and successive updates through 2025 and into early 2026. The Pact explicitly carves out sanctions adopted multilaterally or for foreign‑policy reasons. The carve‑out is narrow, written, and reciprocal: it cannot be used to disguise domestic industrial policy as a national‑security exception.

Why traders, investors and policymakers should care

Three implications follow from the refreshed Pact, and from the GTA data that frames it.

1. The pact narrows operational uncertainty for global supply‑chain managers.

Singapore and New Zealand are not the largest producers of essential goods, but they are among the most important pinch‑points in the Asia‑Pacific essential‑goods supply chain. A meaningful share of the world’s long‑shelf‑life infant formula and a large fraction of clinical‑nutrition concentrates pass through Singaporean or New Zealand ports. Singapore alone manufactures or transships a meaningful fraction of the active pharmaceutical ingredients shipped into Southeast Asia. For a supply‑chain manager who needs to model worst‑case scenarios for 2026 and 2027, the Pact removes one whole branch of the decision tree: barring a national‑security emergency narrowly defined, neither government will be the source of an unanticipated export restriction on a scheduled product. The ninety‑day notification obligation is the operationally important new element it gives firms a contractually meaningful window in which to source alternatives, and it gives counter‑parties a basis on which to seek redress.

2. The pact resets the diplomatic playing field for accession.

The original 2020 declaration’s accession architecture was informal: countries joined by press release. The 2026 update creates a written accession protocol and a standing committee in which acceding members have a vote on schedule revisions. That changes the political economy of joining. For a mid‑sized economy that exports food and pharmaceuticals Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ireland, the Netherlands there is now a clear bench to sit on. Privately, Singaporean and New Zealand negotiators have told reporters they expect at least three new accessions before the end of the calendar year. Whether that materialises will depend on how the largest WTO members react. Both the United States and the European Union remain outside the Pact, but the Indo‑Pacific Economic Framework’s supply‑chain pillar borrows directly from the Pact’s product schedule, and EU‑side officials have indicated informally that Brussels is studying the model for use in its critical‑medicines work plan.

3. The pact is a measurable counter‑example to the global export‑restriction trend.

This is the most important point for policy commentators. The Global Trade Alert’s headline finding, repeated in five successive Annual Reports since 2020, is that the share of harmful interventions in the global stream has risen steadily and is concentrated in export‑side measures and subsidy programmes. The Pact does not reverse that trend. It does, however, prove that two governments operating under intense political pressure to do otherwise can hold the line. The numbers above 318 Green to 243 Red interventions across both countries since 2020, with the Red entries concentrated in war‑related sanctions and industrial‑subsidy categories rather than in trade restrictions per se are unusual enough to be diagnostic.

Two caveats are worth flagging. First, the GTA database explicitly excludes bilateral and multilateral trade agreements from its corpus of unilateral interventions; the Pact itself is therefore not a GTA entry, but its downstream unilateral implementations are. Second, GTA counts interventions, not their economic magnitude. A single broad export ban on wheat can be more disruptive in revenue terms than dozens of tariff concessions on niche products. The Pact’s product schedule is therefore best read as an index of political‑economy commitment, not as a ledger of trade value protected.

Risks, limitations, and the political economy of “essentials”

There are three risks that veteran trade lawyers will rightly press on. The first is enforcement. Neither the 2020 declaration nor the 2026 update is justiciable in the WTO’s dispute‑settlement system, and the Pact does not create a free‑standing tribunal. Enforcement runs through reputation and the threat of denunciation, which works well when both signatories value their reputation as reliable open economies and works less well when one signatory is in a domestic political bind. The ninety‑day notification rule helps; it does not solve.

The second risk is definitional drift. The product schedule has grown from 124 product categories to 196, and the political incentives in 2026 cut in favour of expanding it further: every domestic industry that wants tariff relief has a reason to argue that its inputs are “essential.” Without discipline, an essentials list of this kind risks becoming an open‑ended free‑trade agreement, which the WTO Article XXIV rules govern in a quite different way. The standing review mechanism is a partial answer, but it depends on the chair’s discipline and on a shared definition of what “essential” means.

The third risk is the carve‑out for sanctions. Wellington’s GTA record since 2022 includes a steady stream of Russia‑related sanctions nine MAST‑Chapter‑P entries between February 2022 and February 2026 alone each of which involved a foreign‑customer limit or an export ban on goods to designated entities. None of these are abuses of the Pact: they are coordinated with Western partners and turn on sanctioned end‑users, not on the underlying product class. But the line between “sanctions for foreign‑policy reasons” and “protection of essential domestic supply” can be blurred by a determined government, and the Pact’s carve‑out language will eventually be tested.

What to watch over the next twelve months

Four signals will determine whether the Pact remains a niche bilateral curiosity or whether it becomes the de‑facto template for supply‑chain governance in the Indo‑Pacific.

• Accessions. Watch Chile, which signed the 2020 instrument and has indicated interest in joining the refreshed Pact, and watch the Republic of Korea, which is not a signatory but has parallel supply‑chain language in its IPEF schedule.
• First test of the notification rule. The next time either signatory contemplates a measure that could touch a scheduled product, the ninety‑day window will become a public negotiation. Compliance, or the lack of it, will set the template.
• Schedule expansion debate. The next annual review is scheduled for May 2027. The lobbying about what to add critical minerals processing, semiconductor inputs, agricultural fertilisers, veterinary biologics has already started.
• Interaction with broader trade architecture. If the EU’s Critical Medicines Act ends up cross‑referencing the Pact’s schedule, the geopolitical weight of the instrument increases by an order of magnitude.

Bottom line

The Singapore–New Zealand Essential Supply Trade Pact will not, on its own, reverse the global drift toward export‑side trade policy that the Global Trade Alert has documented since 2020. What it can do, and what it appears designed to do, is establish a clear, written and expandable counter‑example. In a global trading environment in which 4,483 of the 5,638 export‑related interventions notified since the start of 2020 have been harmful, two governments that account together for under one per cent of world trade are betting that the alternative path narrowly defined product lists, zero tariffs, no export restrictions, ninety‑day notifications, transparent accession is operationally and politically viable. The next twelve months will show whether anyone else takes the bet.

For New Zealand exporters and Singaporean transhipment operators, the practical advice is straightforward. Read the schedule. Map your tariff lines against it. Build the ninety‑day notification window into your business‑continuity planning. And when the next external supply shock hits and it will you will know exactly which lever your government has publicly committed not to pull.