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News Roundup

Food Safety and Health: ‘Equivalence’ Decision Okayed

Controversial Paper on Food Safety

No to Mandatory Labelling

Food Safety and Health: ‘Equivalence’ Decision Okayed

WTO members have settled one “implementation” issue by approving a decision on recognising the equivalence of different food safety and animal and plant health measures.

The decision was approved by the WTO ís Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) on 24 October.

It outlines steps designed to make it easier for all WTO members to make use of the "equivalence" provisions of the SPS Agreement, i.e. Article 4. This involves governments accepting different measures which provide the same level of health protection for food, animals and plants.

One objective is to help developing countries that use less sophisticated health and safety technologies than those required by importing countries to prove that their products are equally safe.

The issue has been raised by developing countries as a problem they face in implementing the current WTO agreements. It has been discussed in the WTO General Council in its preparations for the Doha Ministerial Conference.

Information that members have supplied on their experience with equivalence makes it clear that formal equivalence agreements covering countries’ entire health and safety systems are rare even between developed countries. This is because the formal agreements are very complicated technically, time-consuming to negotiate, and the improved market access that results is too modest to make the effort worthwhile.

On the other hand, it is more common for governments to recognise each other's measures as applied to specific products. This can benefit trade.

This decision identifies the kind of information that importing and exporting countries should provide and some factors that importing countries should take into account ñ e.g. historical trade and the need to avoid hindering existing trade. It also addresses needs for technical assistance, encourages the relevant standard-setting bodies to accelerate their related work, and reinforces procedures to make measures transparent.

A number of developing countries submitted comments on an earlier draft. They include India, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Botswana, Oman, South Africa, Thailand, Chile and Argentina. The SPS Committee discussed equivalence under an instruction from the WTO General Council in October 2000.

The WTO's SPS Committee deals with food safety and animal and plant health, but does not set international standards. These are handled by other organisations, in particular the “three sisters” (Codex Alimentarius, Office International des Epizooties or World Organisation for Animal Health, and the International Plant Protection Convention).  

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Controversial Paper on Food Safety

The European Commission (EC) submitted a controversial paper on food safety in the informal discussions at the Committee on Agriculture. In the document, the EC proposed criteria for the application of precaution under the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) that would serve as guidelines for panelists in related future disputes.

The EC believes this issue needs to be addressed in order to avoid criticisms against the WTO that accuse the organisation of requiring Members to force consumers to accept unsafe food. Japanís stated reasons relate to consumer concerns over the expanded use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Europeís experiences with mad cow disease, and fears over food contamination.

The substance of the Committee discussions around food safety in the Agriculture Committee revolved around the need for consumer protection on one hand and the need to avoid disguised protectionism on the other. The issue of whether Article 5.7 of the Agreement on Sanitary

and Phytosanitary measures was clear enough to maintain the balance between these concerns was raised. Article 5.7 of the SPS agreement allows for the use of provisional health measures in the event relevant scientific evidence is insufficient. The EC, Japan, other European countries

and Korea agreed that clarification of this article should be through an Understanding that would also send the right signals to consumers.

To create predictability for Members and to prevent Article 5.7 from being abused for protectionist purposes,  the EC concluded that potential problems in this area could be resolved best if the following five criteria for the application of precaution under Article 5.7 are met:

• The measures should be discriminatory;

• The measures should be aimed at achieving consistency in the level of protection the respective member has chosen;

• The adopted measure should pre-suppose an examination of the benefits and costs of action and lack of action;

• The measure has to ñ even if only provisional ñ be reviewed in the case that new scientific information is obtained; and

• The measure must be based on scientific evidence provided by qualified and respective sources, but not necessarily by the majority of the scientific community.

Efforts by the EC to bring food safety onto the agriculture negotiating agenda, however, were strongly opposed by the US and many developing countries, who argued that the ECís version of the precautionary principle was based on political rather than scientific considerations. 

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No to Mandatory Labelling

Rejecting an EU-backed proposal that all Genetically Modified (GM) foods should be labelled as such, delegates agreed to mandatory labelling only in cases where specific GM foods and inputs are scientifically proven allergens.

Labels could state either that the food in question is a ‘product of modern bio-technology’ or ‘contains genetically modified organisms’, but final approval of the terminology depends on agreement of labelling standards.

An Ad Hoc Inter-governmental Task Force on Foods Derived from Bio-technology is to finalise guidelines on the labelling of GM foods and ingredients by 2003, but both the proposed  scope and the purpose of those guidelines came under intense criticism at the Codex Committee on Food Labelling (CCFL) in April. A revised version will be prepared for the next CCFL session in May 2002.

The key question of traceability - how, and the extent to which, GM inputs are detected in food- was not addressed at the full Codex meeting due to time constraints. The issue will be taken up by the Codex Executive Committee next November.

The EU suffered a setback in July, however, when Codex members led by the United States and backed by Argentina and Malaysia rejected an Executive Committee recommendation that the Codex Alimentarius Commission should ‘ensure coherence between Codex and texts arising from the Cartagena Protocol dealing with such matters as traceability, labelling and identification of living modified organisms used as food”.

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