The TPP Attack on our food safety standards
Will the current Australian Senate inquiry wake up to the many dangers of the TPP in their forthcoming discussions? Here’s more of what to expect if they ratify the TPP.
Don
***********
From a report by the US based Food and Water Watch
The TPP Attack on Commonsense Food Safety Standards (December 2015)
Selected excerpts:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has new and expansive provisions governing food safety and agricultural protection rules that can weaken consumer protections, undermine U.S. food safety standards and expose U.S. crops and livestock to dangerous diseases and pests. This broad area of domestic law and regulation that includes food safety inspection, laboratory testing protocols and quarantines to prevent the entry of livestock diseases and crop pests would be subject to the TPP”™s Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) provisions that make food safety rules more vulnerable to challenge at international trade tribunals. SNIP
The TPP will increase the strain on already overtaxed food safety border inspectors while establishing new limits on acceptable border control policies and procedures. The volume of imported food has skyrocketed under the trade deals of the past two decades, greatly exceeding the ability of border inspectors to oversee the imports. The TPP will further increase food imports, further taxing U.S. border inspection. SNIP
The TPP sets tighter limits on the rigor of import inspection systems, known as control policies. The WTO requires food safety inspections to be prompt, applied equally to domestic and imported foods and be “limited to what is reasonable and necessary.” The TPP is more proscriptive in what border inspections are considered trade-legal. The TPP requires that import inspection oversight programs be based on the risks of the imports.25 Like the WTO, importing countries must ensure that stopping shipments that fail to meet domestic food safety standards “is limited to what is reasonable and necessary,” but it also must based on “available science” and any testing of imports must be “appropriate and validated.”
The stronger TPP language gives exporting countries more avenues to attack border inspection
policies and procedures as illegal trade barriers. Exporters can challenge import screening
protocols for not being adequately based on the risks of the imports. SNIP
******************************************************************************************************
Leave a reply →