Shopping 'green' for food in supermarkets can be difficult -
deciding between products with labels proclaiming their organic
origin, fair trade qualities or low carbon footprint can be
confusing. The challenge for food producers seeking to export to
international markets can be even more demanding: certification is
often too expensive for small exporters.
The international competitiveness of products today depends not
only on their price and quality, but also on safety, environmental
and ethical aspects. To enter lucrative markets, products need to
comply not only with mandatory national requirements set by
governments, often based on international safety standards, but
also with those set by private and voluntary schemes, labels and
marks.
There are currently more than 400 private schemes and their
number is growing, says the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD). Although private standards are not required
by law and are considered as 'voluntary', they are actually
becoming mandatory if foodstuffs are to find their way to most
supermarket shelves in industrial nations.
The proliferation of private standards stems from rising global
concern for sustainable development, supported by the demand for
social equity (e.g. worker protection, occupational health and
safety, fair trade, ethics) and environmental integrity (e.g. life
cycle and green labelling, environmental management and ecological
footprint issues).
While ethical and environmental standards can bring benefits for
both producers and consumers, their growing number and a lack of
harmonization may create a barrier to trade for producers from
developing countries, which is the opposite of what free- and
fair-trade proponents, and consumers, actually want.
In addition, while getting products organically or fair-trade
certified is a plus for exporters from developing countries,
complying with even minimum mandatory food safety standards can be
challenging.
In some cases there is an overlap between private and mandatory
national sanitary and phytosanitary requirements, and private
certification requirements can be even more constraining then the
official ones.
Policy makers, trade development agencies and NGOs can play an
important role in helping developing-country producers comply with
both mandatory and private standards by:
- working to harmonize standards and develop equivalence schemes,
at the national, regional and international levels
- providing information about standards and supporting producers
in choosing the scheme that best suits them and their
customers
- offering capacity-building to improve the production process to
comply with the minimum legal requirements to enter developed
markets in the first place, and then helping producers implement
the necessary private schemes and obtain the required
certificates
- maximizing private-public cooperation to make the certification
process more accessible to small producers and, where applicable,
developing financial mechanisms that will allow exporters to
finance the certification process
- representing the interests and concerns of producers in private
standards bodies.
This table maps some of the most common voluntary standards and
private labels that producers may need to comply with in order to
reach developed-country shopping baskets. It is not comprehensive
but does indicate the labelling maze that exporters from developing
countries have to deal with
Contributors: Audrey Villinger, Ludovica Ghizzoni,
ITCFor more information see ITC's Export Quality
Management web page atwww.intracen.org/eqm