The Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures came into force in consideration with the establishment of the World Trade Organization on 1 January 1995. It deals with the application of food safety and animal and plant health regulations.
The Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures provided the basic rules for food safety and animal and plant health standards.
It permits the countries to set their standards. But it provides that the regulations must be based on science and technology. It should be applied only to the extent necessary such as to protect human, animal or plant life or health. And it should not arbitrarily or reasonably discriminate between countries where such identical or similar conditions exist.
Member countries should be encouraged to use international standards, guidelines and recommendations as they exist. Therefore, members may use measures which result in higher standards if there is any scientific justification. Member countries can also set higher standards based on appropriate evaluation of risks as long as the approach is consistent, and not arbitrary.
Key Features of the Agreement
All countries must follow the measures to ensure that food is safe for every consumer, and to prevent the spread of any pests or diseases among the animals and plants. Both of these measures may take various forms, such as providing products to come from a disease-free area, proper inspection of products, specific treatment or processing of products to be done at different levels, fixing of allowable maximum levels of pesticide residues or permitted use of only certain additives in food. Sanitary (i.e. human health and animal health) and phytosanitary (i.e. plant health) safeguards apply to all such domestically produced food, local animal and plant diseases, and products imported from other countries as well.
The Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) prepared on previous GATT Agreement rules to prohibit the use of unrecognized sanitary and phytosanitary safeguards for trade protection. The basic idea behind the SPS Agreement is to maintain the sovereign power of any government to provide the maximum level of health protection which seems appropriate, to ensure that these sovereign rights are not misused for any protectionist purposes and should not result in unnecessary barriers to international trade.
The SPS Agreement encourages governments to set up national SPS measures correlation with international standards, guidelines and recommendations. Such a process is often termed as "harmonization". The WTO itself does not and will not develop any of such standards. Therefore, most of the WTO’s member governments indulge in the development of such standards in other international bodies. Such standards are developed by prominent scientists in the field and governmental experts on health protection and are subject to international scrutiny and review.
International standards are sometimes often higher than the national requirements of many countries, including the developed countries, but the SPS Agreement explicitly allows the governments to choose not to utilize the international standards. In any case, if the national requirement may result in a wider restriction of trade, a country should be involved to provide scientific justification, demonstrating that the relevant international standard could not result in the level of health protection as country considered appropriate.
