Fierce battle in prospect over food safety rules

Date: 16/09/1999

By Simon Coss

WHEN the subject of food safety comes up for discussion at the Millennium Round talks, negotiators should be prepared for some extremely long days and some very short nights.

The problem with the WTO's current public health rules, including those governing food safety, is that they rarely seem to be invoked solely in order to protect the public's health.

This is particularly true when it comes to trading relations between the EU and the US, with both Washington and Union governments regularly citing consumer health concerns as a reason for slapping restrictions on imports of each others' products.

The most recent example of this is the EU's continued refusal, despite a WTO ruling to the contrary, to allow the sale of hormone-treated US beef because of fears of its long term effects on human health.

Washington also complains that the Union's rules for approving the sale of crops containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are "unnecessarily lengthy and arbitrary", while the EU insists it is simply trying to protect consumers.

One of the reasons why these sorts of dilemmas keep arising is that, in reality, the WTO has no real rules on food safety.

The organisation's founding treaties make it clear that all signatories have the right to set their own standards, while stressing that these should not be "disproportionate" to any perceived health risk.

The problem is that no one can agree on exactly what a disproportionate measure is. In theory, it is up to the WTO to decide whether a signatory has over-reacted or not, as it did earlier this year in the beef-hormone case.

But because the organisation has no benchmark standards on which to base its judgements - only biased national evidence - its decisions are often contested. In the beef hormone case, for example, the EU is sticking by the scientific evidence it produced to support its stance.

One of the challenges for the Millennium Round will be to come up with a definition of appropriate food safety measures that everyone can agree on.

But judging from current declarations on the issue from both the European Commission and the Clinton administration, it is hard to imagine where any such accord could come from.

Ironically, the sorts of statements on food safety put out by the office of outgoing Trade Commissioner Leon Brittan and that of his US counterpart, Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, are almost identical.

Both argue that their respective trading blocs should maintain the right to set their own food safety standards and both also insist that public health rules should not be used to disguise restrictive trading practices.

A clear case of deadlock if ever there was one.

When the subject of food safety comes up for discussion at the Millennium Round talks, negotiators should be prepared for some extremely long days and some very short nights. Article forms part of a survey on world trade, p13-20.