The agreement on the application of
Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures came into force with the
establishment of the World Trade organisation on 1.1.1995. It is a
key agreement based on the negotiations held in the Uruguay round
of trade negotiations which ended in 1994 and together with others
including the amended General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT
1994) forms part of the framework for international trade
regulation.
It is not a detailed prescriptive
agreement. It lays down the framework principles according to which
the members of the WTO (Members) may protect the health of their
citizens, plants and animals.
The purpose of the SPS
agreement – protection without protectionism
The SPS is not an agreement whose
aim is to protect the health of citizens, plants and animals but it
is rather an agreement to protect free trade from those who would
try to abuse SPS regulation in order to achieve trading advantages.
The agreement is an attempt to enable each individual sovereign
member state to protect the health of its citizens, plants and
animals as it deems appropriate, without the regulation required to
do this being used to interfere with the principles of free trade
which underpin the WTO.
Food safety, sanitary and
phytosanitary regulations can be a very effective mechanism to
unfairly discriminate between different members and between members
and the importing country e.g by using SPS measures to grant
advantages to selected members or domestic producers. This
contravenes amongst others the principles of “national treatment”
and “most favoured nation treatment” enshrined in the GATT
agreement which ensure that the goods and services of all members
are treated equally and equitably both at the border and within the
importing country.
SPS measures can take the form for
example of requiring products to come from disease free areas,
inspection, special treatment or processing, setting levels of
residues or additives. The SPS agreement therefore sets out the
parameters according to which SPS measures will be considered to be
consistent with the WTO principles with and therefore acceptable
within the WTO trading block.
Mechanisms should be put in place in the MS to be able to deal
with the Enquiry and Notification requirements of the
agreements
SPS Information
Centre(IC)
Each member is required to designate an Information Centre
responsible for responding to all reasonable enquiries from other
Members for information and documents related to SPS issues. The
SPS EP is expected to provide amongst others current SPS
legislation and regulation, information on risk assessment, control
and inspection procedures.
E.g. IC
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