Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 7 • Number 19 • 2nd November 2007

WTO: WORK ON VOLUNTARY STANDARDS TO CONTINUE


WTO: WORK ON VOLUNTARY STANDARDS TO CONTINUE

A group at the WTO has been discussing transparency issues with regard to the large number of both government-set and private standards, hoping to improve export opportunities and simplify trade in food products.

At a meeting of the WTO Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Products (SPS), held from 18-19 October, Members continued to discuss what role - if any - the WTO could play in regulating the vast array of standards set by the private sector. The Committee also focused on standard agenda items related to specific country rules regarding food, animal and plant safety that affect other countries’ exports.

What role for the WTO with regard to private standards?

Two years ago, St. Vincent and the Grenadines drew attention to the challenges it faced when trying to access the EU market due to strict standards set by commercial supermarket chains (see BRIDGES Weekly, 6 July 2005, http://www.ictsd.org/weekly/05-07-06/story3.htm), and a discussion on voluntary standards has continued at SPS meetings since then (see Bridges Trade BioRes, 6 July 2007, http://www.ictsd.org/biores/07-07-06/story4.htm). According to delegates, the issue has come to somewhat of an impasse, with countries disagreeing on whether the SPS Committee and WTO have the competency to deal with private sector standards.

At the latets meeting, Committee Chair Marinus PC Huige (The Netherlands) asked countries whether they thought the SPS Committee was the correct venue for a discussion on private sector standards - and if so, what the scope of its work should be.

Developing countries including Egypt and many other African countries intervened in support of continued engagement at the WTO. Private sector standard-setting was of key importance to developing countries, they said, given that they led to additional costs and strongly affected potential export opportunities. They further noted that while the standards were in theory voluntary, they became quasi-mandatory in practice, and posed non-tariff barriers to exports. These countries argued that governments should take responsibility for the WTO-compatibility of voluntary standards set by companies within their borders, and that the SPS Committee could support the process.

Developed countries, on the other hand, said the WTO did not have the mandate to deal with standards set by entities other than governments. They added that many of the standards discussed did not cover food safety - the traditional province of the SPS Committee - but rather environment, packaging and other issues that might be raised in other WTO bodies, such as the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade.

The EU said that the discussion at the WTO had already encouraged private sector standard-setting bodies to look more carefully at the development impacts of their activities.

Many Members agreed that future discussions should be based on proposals for how to address the challenges posed by private sector standards, and ought to focus on case studies and countries’ concrete experiences.

New database to ease info access

At a workshop on transparency preceding the SPS meeting, the WTO Secretariat presented a new online database set up to help countries and companies access information about the standards their trading partners have implemented. The SPS Information Management System database covers regular and emergency notifications, and recognition of equivalence among different standards.

At the meeting itself, discussion also focused on the specific concerns countries have raised with regard to certain regulations and measures other countries have put in place to deal with food, animal and plant health and safety. For example, Thailand had raised concerns over Australia’s import restrictions on prawns and prawn products, and the US over India’s avian influenza restrictions. Members also discussed food safety and standards set by China, as a part of a review mechanism required as a follow-up to the country’s WTO accession in 2001.

Under the SPS Agreement, WTO Members are allowed to set a standard of human and plant protection that they consider ‘appropriate,’ but any trade restrictions must be backed by a scientific risk assessment and applied only to the extent necessary to attain the stated goal.

The next meeting of the SPS Committee is scheduled for 2-3 April 2008.

Additional resources

The WTO’s SPS Information Management System is available at http://spsims.wto.org/

"’Untransparent’ private standards criticized in a week of more transparency," WTO RELEASE, 19 October 2007; ICTSD reporting.