Private standards in international trade

Since 1947, the beginning of the multilateral negotiations for coordination and standardization of international trade within the scope of GATT, there have been many advances in terms of tariff reductions and establishment of rules for manufactured goods (Mesquita, 2005) whereas, in contrast the agricultural products were only introduced on the agenda of negotiations at the Uruguay Round (1986 - 1994) (Jank et al,2005).
However, as agriculture became under multilateral discipline, namely through the reduction of tariff barriers, new challenges have arised such as the indiscriminate and unjustified use of technical and sanitary measures (also known as new protectionism) and the emergence of private regulation of international trade with the creation of so-called private standards.

In general, private standards are, as defined by Liu (2009), “standards designed and owned by non-governmental entities, be they for profit (businesses) or not-for-profit organizations. Whereas governmental standards (usually called technical regulations) may either be mandatory or voluntary, private standards are voluntary by definition”.

The main reasons for the increase in the number of private standards are: responses to food hazards, increased interest from consumers about food production processes, the shift of responsibility for food safety from public to private sector, the globalization of supply chains and the necessity of differentiation (Geraets and Wouters, 2012).

The aim of this research is to analyze to what extent the proliferation of private standards in the area of food safety impacts the operation of the rules relating to international trade in meat products (one of the industries most affected by the phenomenon). In some cases, such private standards do compete with government standards and international rules laid out in the SPS and TBT Agreements, under the WTO, creating various trade barriers apparently unjustified from the scientific point of view and disrespecting those same agreements.
The methodology involves the selection of private standards with importance to the meat industry, the systematization of information into a database and comparative analysis of the technical requirements set out in the private standards and those established in the multilateral framework. The aim is to find whether private standards are more trade restrictive than the standards set out in the multilateral system, thus becoming an obstacle to international trade.