Time was when food businesses only had to worry about complying with health and safety rules administered by their local authorities. Would that life be so simple today. In the age of globalisation, officials from multifarious multilateral organisations are beavering away, producing international rule books governing the standard of consumable food and drink; and influencing and determining the agricultural practices that food manufacturers and processors must follow, if they want their produce to be bought on world markets.
Despite the debacle that was last year’s Seattle summit of the World Trade Organisation, a new Round on trade in agricultural goods has been launched this year, quietly, at WTO HQ, in Geneva, Switzerland.
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The talks will almost certainly lead to a further erosion of the power of national governments to impose import restrictions on food products. The result of this will inevitably be a growth in importance of global conventions on food safety, so that countries cannot be accused of locking an import, merely to protect their domestic food producers.
Ian Gardiner, deputy director general of Britain’s National Farmers Union, is aware of the issues: “When trade barriers come down, then these type of international rules become more important. What measures can a receiving country take to prevent, say, the Colorado beetle, from spreading, for instance? These are increasingly important questions, where the balance of forces over what is the public good isn’t clear at all.”
A closer look at this issue reveals a large number of international organisations trying to write rules for the global food economy.
One curiously-named, but important, group is the Paris-based Office International de Epizooties, the global watchdog on diseases that can be passed from animal, meat and dairy products to man: zoonoses.
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By GlobalDataIn particular, it can declare whether a particular country or region is free of distinctly marketing-unfriendly diseases, such as Foot and Mouth, BSE, Japanese encephalitis and anthrax.
The office is also becoming increasingly proactive, considering, for instance, how to unleash emergency international intervention to combat an outbreak of deadly zoonoses in Africa. Tropical climates offer viruses and bacteria ideal conditions to flourish and the widening of world trade in food products means there is a growing risk that some cases of diseases such as cholera being spread to the west via fish product exports. There were also reports of an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Gabon, which was linked to the local consumption of monkey meat, a problem perhaps less likely to be exported. Diseases can travel the other way. Salmonella has been exported to developing countries from the west via exports of intensively farmed eggs.
The organisation promotes good practice. In its latest annual session, discussions centred on the diagnosis and prevention of TB in animals, through new tests and analyses and the vaccination of the wild animals, to prevent the disease spreading to farm animals.
The office also acts proactively, recently staging a training course on epidemiological surveillance of animal diseases in Beirut, the Lebanon, bringing together veterinary practitioners from acrtoss the Middle East, from Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. It is an example of the office’s goal of improving education and understanding.
Paradoxically, clarity is not yet a virtue found in abundance in the world’s burgeoning global regulatory system. There are a myriad of groups and some of their names and roles seem to have been designed to baffle. There is the Rome-based Codex Alimentarius Commission, (literally Latin for book of nourishment), which is tasked with making recommendations on food standards for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation, promoting the health of consumers and fair practice in the food trade.
Codex itself is split into a number of specialist committees, such as its committee on food labelling, its committee on soups and broths, its committee on pesticide residues and its committee on food additives and contaminants.
These bodies create standards that are extremely detailed. The Committee on Fish and Fishery Products is currently discussions an amendment to the Codex Standard for Quick Frozen Fish Sticks, regarding declarations about ingredients, for instance.
Its central committee on general principles also has a wide remit, discussing matters such as a proposed draft revised Code of Ethics for International Trade in Foods.
Codex works alongside the Secretariat of the International Plant Protection Convention, also in Rome, which was set up to make sure that national governments follow global rules on inspections, packing, disinfection, research and publicity to halt the spread of pests and disease from the trade in fruits and vegetable products.
Its key role is to uphold the 1951 International Plant Protection Convention, which provides for global rules on how governments should act to prevent the spread of plant disease. It also polices additional conventions that have since been agreed, covering plant quarantine, pest risk analysis and eradication, the import and release of exotic biological control agents and export certification.
Working alongside these three key bodies are an array of other international food industry groups. These include:
- The World Trade Organisation – As well as being the agent for scrapping import controls that have fuelled the growth in importance of global food business conventions, it is also the guardian body of the international Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. Here, the WTO disputes procedure polices global rules on when governments can intervene and block imports because of legitimate health concerns.
It also takes a more proactive stance in promoting good practice, recently staging a two day seminar on how central American countries have dealt with the risk of BSE, Madagascar with African swine fever, Australia with diseased Chinese pears and the USA with salmonella in eggs. - VICH – An organisation promoting international cooperation on the harmonisation of technical requirements for the registration of veterinary medicinal products, it has developed a draft standard on quality systems for veterinary laboratories.
- OIE Fish Diseases Commission – It also draws up global guidelines to improve fish health and the standard of food that fish produce. Recent work has focused on an International Aquatic Animal Health Code, a Diagnostic Manual for Aquatic Animal Diseases, guidelines on emergency intervention plans in the aquatic environment and designation of new internationally recognised Reference Laboratories which are experts in the field.
- Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture – The policeman of the legally binding International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources, that has been the subject of recent negotiations, notably on how to ensure that genetic developments are made available across the world and that farmers’ rights are protected.
- The OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, has also become involved in setting guidelines for the food industry. Its rich country members have asked its officials to “undertake a study of the implications of biotechnology and other aspects of food safety.”
It has also set up some sub-groups to make recommendations on good practice, including the OECD Task Force for the Safety of Novel Foods and Feeds, the OECD Working Group for the Harmonisation of Regulatory Oversight in Biotechnology, and the OECD Ad Hoc Group on Food Safety.
Overseeing all these bodies is the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, which has a general remit to promote agricultural development, nutrition and food security. It offers development assistance; collects, analyses and disseminates information; provides policy and planning advice to governments and acts as an international forum for debate on food and agriculture issues.
Also based in Rome, it has more than 4,300 staff and a biennial budget of around US$650 million.
A key role of the FAO is spreading information about good practice in the food industry, but it would appear that it has a long way to go regarding spreading public understanding of the complex global regulatory system which at best superficial.
The problem is that issues discussed are invariably highly specialised and understood by a small coterie of experts. They work like scientists, not politicians, following a laudable brief, that if we must have world trade, then rules must be developed to make it fair and safe.
And although scientists are often strong on integrity and intellectual rigour, they are often far weaker on communication skills and public consultation.
As a result, few food business managers will know of the intricate debates at Codex over pesticide residues or soup additives. They do not have time.
And when rules are passed down from on high, alienation and disgruntlement can follow: witness the WTO’s failure to explain its mission at Seattle.
Even fellow international organisations can have problems following debates.
Take the recent Byzantine negotiations to frame a Convention on Biological Diversity. Regarding related talks on an International Understanding on Plant Genetic Resources, representatives from the south-east Asian group of nations, (ASEAN), had no idea whether this text was to become legally binding and had to formally ask a World Trade Organisation committee to find out for them.
Mr Gardiner takes the view that specialist commissions and international bodies must spend much more energy on communicating their activities their vast global public.
“Being more remote, there’s a danger of their being a lack of understanding of what they are doing. There needs to be a stronger duty on them to act openly and communicate their positions and the reasons for them, more effectively.”
