The European Commission has issued a Call for Evidence to assess the rationale and legal feasibility of applying EU health and environmental standards to imported agricultural and agri-food products.
While supportive of the overall goal of working toward a global sustainable food system, the U.S. Meat Export Federation (USMEF) strongly disagrees that applying EU health and environmental standards to imported products will contribute to that goal. Cheyenne McEndaffer, USMEF senior director of export services, explained why the USMEF submitted comments opposing the move.
?Under the World Trade Organization, applying your standards or regulations to an importing country just for the sake of applying them without very clear, defined human or animal health risks is not compliant,? McEndaffer said. ?We have some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world, but that’s really dictated by voluntary and commercial practices at the farm level, as well as third party and regulatory standards at the slaughter plant level. So that’s really of the focus these comments: we have two very different ways to reach similar outcomes, and imposing one country or trade union, in the case of the EU, to weigh on other countries, just doesn’t really make sense when you don’t take into consideration different geographic, climate, and cultural differences across the world.?
McEndaffer added that U.S. farmers are not alone in opposing the health and environmental standards on imported products.
?There are concerns for the domestic European industry as well,? McEndaffer said. ?Europe is a historical ag producer and exporter in many goods like pork, etc., and based on decades and decades of overregulation, they’ve become more and more reliant on the common ag policy or CAP for heavy subsidies. They’re already facing a very different marketplace than we do on our side of the ocean. And they see more regulations coming at them. They fear that they won’t be able to compete with imports, but also if these requirements placed on exporting countries are deemed WTO non-compliant, they could face risk in their export markets with retaliatory duties, etc.?
For more information, visit usmef.org.
