Food Quality

Food quality standards include all those product and process attributes of a food product (is it contaminated by pesticide residues? Are eggs produced in industrial or free-range or organic?). While agricultural policy reform is contributing to a gradual deregulation of the agricultural sector, where food safety and quality is concerned increased regulation is the norm. Food standards may facilitate trade by alleviating consumer fears about imported products. But they can also act as trade barriers where exporters must comply with different standards in different countries. For developing countries, the cost and difficulties of meeting and demonstrating compliance with legitimate food standards can pose a number of significant non-tariff barriers to trade.

Why is food safety and quality becoming more important in international trade?

Safety is one of the food quality attributes of a food product but not the only one. Food safety is an issue of growing importance due to several worldwide trends that contribute to increasing safety risks in food systems:

• The growing movement of people, live animals, and food products that contribute to increasing safety risks in food systems
• Rapid urbanisation
• Changes in food handling
• The emergence of new pathogens or antibiotic resistance in pathogens

Increased international food trade means that countries share the responsibility for food safety. Food related events and scientific advances in one country often have a direct effect on other regions. Globalisation of our food supply introduces new food safety risks, revives previously controlled risks and spreads contaminated food more widely.

Food safety issues of recent concern include BSE in cattle, avian flu, salmonella in poultry, agrochemical residues in food, the increasing number and diversity of food additives, the use of illegal substances in livestock production, food irradiation, and genetically engineering foods.

Other food quality standards (e.g. fair trade, organic, carbon footprint, nutrition, animal welfare, environment) are also growing in importance as supermarket respond to consumer concerns in these areas. While food safety issues are primarily the responsibility of public authorities, a feature of other food quality standards is that compliance is often driven by the requirements of private firms such as food processors and supermarkets.

Food Safety and Developing Countries

Food safety affects developing countries on two levels. On one level, inadequate food safety is a significant contributor to the burden of disease in developing countries. In the LDCs, 70% of deaths among children under 5 are linked to biologically contaminated food.

On the other hand, processed food exports to developed country markets have emerged as a potentially major new source of dynamic export growth (PDF) for many developing countries and food safety concerns form an integral part of export agreements. However, there is a concern that more stringent standards will undermine the competitive progress already made by some developing countries and present barriers to new entrants into high value food trade. These concerns centre round the following issues:

• Emerging food safety and agricultural health measures will be applied in a discriminatory manner
• Developing countries lack the administrative, technical, and other capacities to comply with new or more stringent requirements
• The costs incurred to reach compliance will undermine the competitive advantage of developing countries in high value food trade
• Institutional weaknesses and compliance costs will further marginalise weaker economic players, including smaller countries, small and medium sized enterprises, and small farmers.
• Inadequate support is available for capacity-building in this area, despite the provisions in the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards.

Food Safety and International Trade Rules

From the point of view of international trade rules, the issue is to find the balance between disguised protectionism and legitimate objectives of food safety. This may prove difficult to achieve given that scientific evidence on health impacts may be limited and consumer fears may derive from a mixture of health, environment and ethical concerns (e.g. GMOs) and not just food safety alone.

Within the framework of the WTO, the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS Agreement) establishes and enforces rules regarding the application of food safety. The SPS Agreement permits countries to take legitimate measures to protect the life and health of consumers, provided that such measures can be justified scientifically and do not unnecessarily impede trade. In principle, the SPS Agreement should help to facilitate trade by improving transparency, promoting harmonisation, and preventing the implementation of measures that cannot be justified scientifically. The Agreement recognises the need of developing countries for Special and Differential Treatment (SDT). Despite this special treatment, developing countries in practice face a number of difficulties under the SPS agreement.

What are EU food safety requirements for developing country exporters?

EU food safety policy has its roots in the 2000 White Paper on Food Safety and aims to assure a high level of food safety, animal health, animal welfare and plant health within the EU. The EU has specific requirements in terms of general food law, traceability (PDF), animal nutrition, labelling, biotechnology, chemical safety and biological safety.

There is also degree of flexibility built into the food safety policy. For example, the EU can ban imports from unsafe conditions during outbreaks of highly infectious animal diseases like foot-and-mouth disease. The European Food Safety Authority provides risk assessment on all matters regarding food and feed safety.

The EU imports from 100 countries around the world. To ensure that imported products live up to EU food safety standards, imports are only allowed from listed countries and establishments. Brazil, for example, has 473 listed establishments approved for trade. Smaller countries can also have a significant number of establishments – Ghana has 67 establishments for fishing.

Just how significant is the effect of EU safety standards on developing country exports is open to debate. The EU argues that as the world biggest importer of food, its standards are justified and that EU import statistics refute any argument over damage to developing country exports.

However, not all developing countries agree. Brazil, the biggest beef exporter, has been particularly critical of EU standards after the EU severely restricted imports of Brazilian beef in February 2008 following a critical report by the EU's Food and Veterinary Authority. However, a report by the European Ombudsman, in response to a complaint by British and Irish farm organisations that the Commission should have responded to poor administration of Brazil's food-and-mouth disease controls by a complete ban, defended the Commission's response as proportionate within the terms of the WTO SPS Agreement although critical of the delay in implementing that response.

Supermarkets and Private Standards

Global supply chains dominanted by supermarkets have demanding private standards for quality attributes such as size, colour, consistency, volume, year-round supply and food safety. The standards sought by supermarkets from their suppliers are increasing partly to mitigate regulatory and reputational risks (higher standards can help to prevent food scandals which would damage the business) and partly in order to gain competitive advantage in higher value food markets through differentiating products based on an increasing array of food quality attributes (e.g. where a retailer seeks to brand itself as promoting low-salt foods).

A key issue for a developing country food exporter or supplier is to gain access to the global value chain. With a diminishing number of leading retailers and global food businesses due to industry consolidation and concentration trends, there is greater scope for exclusion from entire markets if private standards laying down conditions of entry are not met. By the same token, for those exporters who do gain access to these global value chains, the benefits in terms of trade relations can be substantial.

Standards: protection or catalyst?

The fear is that standards, whether public food safety standards or private food quality standards, raise the cost of access for developing country exporters and risk marginalising smallholders from the more lucrative global value chains. Case studies suggest that collective action by smallholders is necessary but not necessarily sufficient to ensure that smallholders can participate in these high value supply chains. Development assistance can play an important role in promoting coherence between our desire as consumers for an increasing array of food quality attributes and creating market opportunities for poverty reduction in developing countries.

Links:

European Commission DG Health and Consumer Protection Food Safety Website
Portal for news and developments on EU policies concerning food safety from farm to fork

World Health Organisation Food Safety Website

WTO Website Understanding the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

European Food Safety Authority Website

Resources:

Athukorala, M., Food Safety Issues, Trade and WTO Rules: A Developing Country Perspective (PDF), 2003
Detailed paper that reviews the key issues related to the trade effects of food safety standards in the context of the current debates on strengthening the global trade architecture for development

CUTS International, SPS Standards and Developing Countries: The Skeleton in the Closet for the Doha Round (PDF), 2006
Detailed paper that reviews the key issues related to the trade effects of food safety standards in the context of the current debates on strengthening the global trade architecture for development

FAO, Non-tariff Measures in Agricultural Trade (PDF), 2005
Brief fact-sheet on non-tariff measures in agricultural trade prepared for the sixth WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong 

IFPRI, 2020 Vision: Food Safety in Food Security and Food Trade, 2003
Series of 17 Policy Briefs that address key issues and perspectives on food safety in food security and food trade, including very useful briefs in ‘Food safety as a Public Health Issue for Developing Countries’, Trends in Food Safety Standards and Regulation: Implications for Developing Countries’ and ‘Food Safety Issues in International Trade’

USDA, Food Safety and Trade: Regulations, Risks, and Reconciliation
Briefing paper examining the differing food safety regulations of countries and regions and investigates the reasons for the differences.