Food Safety Issues, Trade and WTO Rules: A Developing Country Perspective

摘要

In recent years, processed food exports to developed country markets have emerged as a potentially major new source of dynamic export growth for many developing countries. However, exploiting this potential poses many challenges. In particular, the capacity of developed country exporters to penetrate these markets depends critically on their ability to meet increasingly more stringent food safety standards imposed in developed countries. Not only are these standards typically much higher than those prevailing in developing countries, and often difficult and costly to meet, but they are also subject to frequent changes. Such changes are to be expected, given advances in scientific knowledge about health hazards, improvements in food processing technology, and the highly income-elastic consumer preferences for higher safety standards. However, some of the changes have provoked strong suspicions that food safety standards are being used as a non-transparent, trade impeding protectionist tool, rather than as a legitimate instrument for the protection of human, plant and animal health.