A strong food and agriculture system is fundamental to economic growth, poverty reduction, environmental sustainability, and human health. The Agriculture and Food Series is intended to prompt public discussion and inform policies that will deliver higher incomes, reduce hunger, improve sustainability, and generate better health and nutrition from the food we grow and eat. It expands on the former Agriculture and Rural Development series by considering issues from farm to fork, in both rural and urban settings. Titles in this series undergo internal and external review under the management of the World Bank's Agriculture and Food Global Practice.
This paper explores the competing concepts of 'standards as barriers' and 'standards as catalysts' in the context of food safety standards in international trade in agricultural and food products. Through a review of existing evidence of the impact of food safety standards on developing country exports of agricultural and food products and the results of a series of country- and product-specific case studies, it is suggested that food safety standards can act as both a barrier to trade and the basis of competitive positioning for developing countries in international markets. This suggests that broad conclusions about the trade effects of food safety standards on developing countries are problematic, rather the level and ways in which agricultural and food exports are impacted can be product, country, standard and even firm-specific. Copyright 2007 The Authors.
Bank in Vietnam. For their valuable inputs to our work, we thank Nguyen The Dung (the World Bank), and members of the project research consortium, especially Dao The Anh (Centre for Agrarian System Research and Development), Nguyen Ngoc Que and Do Anh Phong (Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agricultural and Rural Development), Vo Thi Thanh Loc, Le Canh Dung and their teams at the Mekong Development Institute. We thank Michael Jerie (Centre of Policy Studies) for helpful comments on the paper.
The proliferation and increased stringency of food safety and agricultural health standards is a source of concern among many developing countries. These standards are perceived as a barrier to the continued success of their exports of high-value agro-food products (including fish, horticultural, and other products), either because these countries lack the technical and administrative capacities needed for compliance or because these standards can be applied in a discriminatory or protectionist manner. This paper draws on available literature and work in progress to examine the underlying evidence related to the changing standards environment and its impact on existing and potential developing country exporters of high-value agricultural and food products. The evidence presented in this paper, although only partial, suggests that the picture for developing countries as a whole is not necessarily problematic and certainly is less pessimistic than the mainstream 'standards-as-barriers' perspective. Indeed, rising standards serve to accentuate underlying supply chain strengths and weaknesses and thus impact differently on the competitive position of individual countries and distinct market participants. Some countries and/or industries are even using high quality and safety standards to successfully (re-)position themselves in competitive global markets. This emphasizes the importance of considering the impacts of food safety and agricultural health measures within the context of wider capacity constraints and underlying supply chain trends and drivers. The key question for developing countries is how to exploit their strengths and overcome their weaknesses such that they are gainers rather than losers in the emerging commercial and regulatory context.
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