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Europe's technical barriers to trade scare Indian farm exporters

Ranvir Nayar in Paris

The failure of the Seattle Ministerial Conference is likely to hit the Indian farm exporters soon as they face rapidly increasing technical barriers to trade or TBTs in their traditional export markets like the European Union.

TBTs are amongst the most common non-tariff barriers that several countries use to keep imports out. Of late, TBTs are increasingly been employed in farm products where instruments like agricultural practices and ecological labelling or eco-labelling are being used to control the import of food products.

The trend is especially visible in the European Union where local producers are increasingly using labels to catch the consumers' attention. Several developing countries have complained in the past that the eco-labelling requirements in the European Union act as strong barriers to imports from the developing world and that the labels are contrary to the requirements of the World Trade Organisation.

The WTO itself has given a half-hearted approval to the EU labelling by saying that `they are not incompatible with the existing WTO rules'.

The developing countries say that in farm products labelling can often be misleading since growing conditions vary from country to country and it is almost impossible to prove whether one practice is superior to the others.

Moreover, the developing countries argue that the European Union is infamous for its highly intensive farming practices, almost resembling a factory, which have led to large scale ecological degradation of its land and water resources. Hence, they argue, the European Union can not take the high moral ground in clean and environment farming techniques.

But the European Commission officials say that the labels represent the increasingly aware consumers who are very particular about the protection of environment and add that even if the labelling had not been there, the consumers would have forced it to happen.

``The eco-labels may carry the risks of being used as a protectionist tool, but today the consumers may form their own barriers to imports of what they consider dubious production methods. And once such barriers have taken widespread roots in the mindset of the European consumer, it may take a very long while for the affected countries to remove them,'' cautions Raffaele Petriccione, head of the unit of investment negotiations in the European Commission.

Another controversial aspect of the TBT is the stipulation of international standards. The developing countries have long complained that they have had no role at all in setting of international standards which are almost entirely being decided by the developed world and their corporate giants.

Petriccione admits that the complaints are genuine but adds that most developing countries lack the resources and the technical know-how to participate in the process. But he is also not comfortable about leaving the job entirely to the corporate sector.

``Most international organisations charged with the task of setting international standards have done a bad job of setting these standards, whether it is telephones or the mobile phones. But can we trust the corporates to do the job ?'' asks Petriccione.

TBT issues were one of the main items on the agenda for the new round which was supposed to have been launched after the Seattle Ministerial Conference in December. The failure of the Seattle Conference means that the disputes between the developed and the developing world can not be resolved in the near future.

Although under the WTO, there is a TBT Committee, many of the developed countries feel that the TBT Committee may not be the right place to thrash out such basic issues and that a broader forum like the Ministerial Conference is more suitable for resolving these issues.

But there is another forum that can be used to sort out these issues -- the triannual review of the TBT. This review is held every three years and is basically an overview of the way TBT issues have developed since the last TBT Review Conference.

But even this conference is not slated to be held for another 18 months and hence, willy-nilly, India and other developing countries will have to wait for this conference before they can seriously hope to resolve the issues. But Petriccione says he doubts the ability of the review to address the issues satisfactorily. ``They could not do it the last time around and there is no reason to believe that they will be able to do it the next time,'' Petriccione told rediff.com.

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