The proposal Taiwan previously made to establish a safe level of residues of the veterinary drug ractopamine in meat products in a WTO notification “creates no obligation” for the country to follow through with its implementation, a WTO official said.
Taipei notified the WTO on Aug. 16, 2007, of its intent to set maximum residue levels (MRLs) for ractopamine, but later decided to delay the adoption to an unspecified future date in an addendum to the notification, dated Sept. 5 that year.
After a food-poisoning outbreak in Shanghai, China, linked to pork with clenbuterol residue, the government banned the use of all beta-agonists, or leanness enhancers, including ractopamine, in animal feed, with zero tolerance for traces in meat products.
Asked by the Taipei Times if the 2007 notification restricted the the country leeway to deregulate the use of ractopamine, Peter Ungphakorn, information officer at the WTO Information and External Relations Division, said that the action “creates no obligation” to carry it out.
“So long as the present measure is not considered illegal in the WTO, there is no obligation to set a date to implement MRLs,” said Ungphakorn, who deals with the WTO’s Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, also known as the SPS agreement, in an e-mail reply to an inquiry on Wednesday last week.
Taiwan made the notification in accordance with Article 7 of the SPS agreement, which requires WTO members to notify changes in their sanitary or phytosanitary measures and provide information on them.
Ungphakorn said that “notifications are not legally binding,” as stated in the SPS agreement and its annexes. The purpose of the publication of a sanitary or phytosanitary regulation is to enable interested members to become acquainted with the measure.
They are not like “commitments” to comply with WTO rules, which Ungphakorn said are defined as “legally binding” in the Marrakesh Agreement that established the WTO.
Ungphakorn said that “notifications are not commitments” because notifications “simply contain information for the rest of the WTO membership.”
“If, however, this became a legal dispute, and if the ban [on the use of ractopamine] were shown to be illegal, there could be an obligation to change the measure, but so far it is not the subject of a legal dispute,” Ungphakorn added.
The commitments Taiwan made to the WTO are set forth in its Protocol of Accession and its working party report, signed off before it was admitted to the WTO in January 2002.
In the past 10 years, there has been no other commitment made because the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations has been stuck since it was launched in 2001.
Asked about possible fallout of a WTO member failing to implement a notification in terms of its credibility, Ungphakorn said he could not answer that question.
“Changing a policy can happen anywhere and how other WTO members view it is up to them,” he said.
According to the WTO document database, the US has urged Taiwan to implement the notified measure at several SPS meetings since 2008 and the issue was also brought up during the WTO Trade Policy Review of Taiwan in 2010.
The official records of the meetings at which the US raised its concern showed that the US focused on the “lack of scientific basis” for such a ban adopted by Taiwan and “the significant barriers to trade” it imposed, rather than casting doubt on the country’s credibility.
Countries sharing the concern of the US included Canada, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru, which are among a total of 27 countries in the world which allow ractopamine in animal feed, against 160 countries that oppose it.
In addition to these countries, Colombia, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand and the Philippines called for adoption of the proposed MRLs for ractopamine by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the international food standards body, to avoid non-science-based trade barriers.
The proposed MRLs for ractopamine have been stuck at the final stage of approval by the Codex Alimentarius Commission since 2008.
On the other hand, at several SPS Committee meetings, Switzerland and Norway have shared the concerns of the EU and China, which have been leading the opposition to adopting MRLs for ractopamine in the Codex process, saying that the Codex debate showed that “no scientific consensus” exists regarding the safety of ractopamine.
At an SPS Committee meeting held in September last year, the EU argued that as there was no international standard for ractopamine, each member was free to adopt its own national measures as long as they were in line with the SPS Agreement.
The next SPS Committee meeting is due to begin on Wednesday, when the US will once again raise Taiwan’s ban on ractopamine in beef and pork as an issue of concern.
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