GENEVA – Producers in developing countries are worried about the growing trend of retail chains setting their own food standards, which they argue are often little more than trade barriers.
Whether these new private requirements relate to food safety and labour practices or environmental and fair trade rules, they usually are more onerous than international standards agreed to through World Trade Organization negotiations and are not based on agreed criteria for judging product safety.
Members of the WTO sanitary and phytosanitary (SPC) committee on animal and plant health recently agreed to explore the problems that private standards create for food traders.
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“The committee’s focus is now on bringing together an informal group of delegates so that the subject of private standards can be discussed more systematically,” a WTO official said after a June 25 meeting of the SPS committee.
It is a touchy subject that is undermining one of the few areas of WTO rules not under dispute in current negotiations – SPS standards. The standards, which were agreed to in 1995, govern the level of food, animal and plant safety required to meet international trade standards.
“I think member countries see that the agreement has worked relatively well and the architecture that is in place is doing the job,” a WTO official said in a background briefing.
“They also realize that to open the whole issue of food safety standards would be opening a Pandora’s box of new demands for regulation or exemption.”
One of the most popular WTO services is an offer of training for developing countries to help them raise their food inspection standards to SPS agreement levels. Reaching that level is supposed to guarantee them market access.
However, since 1995, a number of private food companies have developed their own rules, often requiring compliance higher than SPS agreement levels. The private rules restrict the ability of some countries to get their products into markets even though they meet internationally agreed upon standards.
The issue was first raised at the WTO in 2005 and is growing as a developing-country concern as more private standards are set. They complain that these private rules undermine the international rules-based trading system.
At an SPS committee meeting late last year, developing country delegates complained that “private standards are not transparent as they are not notified to the WTO and they are created without input from exporters,” said a WTO report from the meeting.
“These developing countries also claimed some standards are restrictions on market access, acting as non-tariff barriers for their products.”
However, WTO officials say it is still not clear if the organization or its member countries can stop companies from setting higher standards than the minimum required by international agreement.
