Multinational food companies will sell you whatever you want, and deliver whatever they have - not always the same thing.  But if you complain that they slipped shoddy or poisonous product from overseas into their fancy packaging, then you are a protectionist.

The American Meat Institute and other multinational food industry associations have been powerful in Washington, but they cannot overcome the irresistable force - parents will not tolerate dangerous food on their family's table. 

The use of product standards is on the increase on international trade.  Radical free traders call them "non-tariff trade barriers."   We call them food safety rules.  Trade lawyers want to determine whether a food safety regime unduly affects trade. 

Says one trade lawyer:

"There has long been a suspicion that some standards-based barriers to farm or agri-food products are substitutes for other, more transparent forms of trade protection such as tariffs or quotas," Mr Gallagher says. 

Let's see those guys in a lab isolating melamine byproducts from a kidney and determining the cause of death.

We have spent 100 years since Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" improving our food safety system, and trade lawyers are trying their best to dismantle it.   

WTO member countries are required to report such standards when they are stricter than international norms – requested when a country wants specially stringent standards for a particular product or when a new threat such as avian flu arises. The WTO monitors such standards for potentially protectionist effects, and complaints about them have also been steadily rising.
 

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Write comment

Name

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment