Impacts of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) on International Agricultural Trade
Abstract: ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• The 14th Conference of Economists on the Egyptian Agricultural Trade - Potentials and Determinants, Egyptian Association of Agricultural Economics, Cairo, Egypt, September 2017.
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The GATT Uruguay Round negotiations resulted in the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO was created to oversee the implementation of its agreements, facilitate further trade-liberalization discussions among member governments, and to administer the dispute settlement system. The negotiations also added a set of comprehensive trade agreements dealing with agriculture, including the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS).
The SPS Agreement establishes rules, which countries must observe when formulating, and adopting health measures that affect trade. It recognizes the right of governments to take phytosanitary measures, provided that these are necessary for the protection of plant health and are based on transparent and accepted scientific principles and evidences. The objective of SPS Agreement is to avoid unjustified restrictions on trade. This is consistent with the long-standing objectives of the IPPC concerning plant health requirements aimed at preventing the spread of plant pests by the international trade. In addition, the SPS Agreement gives the IPPC a significant chance to collaborate with the WTO and member governments to promote the development and use of international standards for phytosanitary measures, exchange official information, provide technical expertise and seek advice for both of the WTO and the individual member governments.
Governments intervene in agricultural trade by means of direct and indirect instruments with various objectives, the most common being to raise tax revenue, to support producers' inputs, to reduce consumers' food costs and to counter the interventions of other countries. Direct protection instruments affect commodities as they enter international trade either as imports or as exports. The most common ones are tariffs, import and export quotas and export taxes and subsidies.
Sanitary and phytosanitary restrictions applied to imports are not trade measures but can easily be turned into them. They have been increasingly used with the deliberate purpose of shielding domestic producers from international competition. It is not rare that nations introduce such restrictions not to prevent health hazards on the basis of scientific evidence but in response to public activism from interested parties.
The purpose of the SPS Agreement is to ensure that measures established by governments to protect human, animal and plant life and health are consistent with obligations prohibiting arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination on trade between countries where the same conditions prevail. Also, such measures shall not be applied in a manner that would constitute a disguised restriction on international trade. It requires that, WTO members base their national measures on international standards, guidelines and other recommendations adopted by the Codex Alimentations Commission (CAC) for food safety measures, measures should be based on those standards adopted and recommended by the International Office of Epizootics (OIE) for animal life and health measures, and the standards and recommendations of the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) for plant life and health measures. The Agreement also allows for countries to adopt stricter.
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URL
Publication year 2006
Availability location مكتبة معهد بحوث الاقتصاد الزراعي-7 ش نادى الصيد - مبنى الهيئات والشركات - الدقي- الجيزة (الدور الرابع)
Availability number
Organization Name
City القاهرة
serial title المؤتمر الرابع عشر للاقتصاديين الزراعيين حول التجارة الزراعية المصرية-الإمكانات والمحددات
Author(s) from ARC
Publication Type Conference/Workshop
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