Delegates at the Codex Committee On Food Import And Export Inspection And Certification Systems (meeting from 25 February to 1 March in Brisbane, Australia) failed to significantly move forward in their discussions on the Draft Guidelines on judging equivalence of sanitary measures in food inspection and certification systems. The Committee will now establish a Working Group to look into this issue. Efforts to draw up such a standard for the equivalence of technical regulations were abandoned altogether.

Some progress was made in the discussion on whether equivalence judgements should be made on a product-by-product basis (as proposed by Argentina in the WTO Committee for the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) last year; see BRIDGES Weekly, 17 July 2001) or on a system-wide basis, with delegates agreeing to accept both approaches. A small victory could also be claimed by the International Association Of Consumer Food Organizations (IACFO) when delegates agreed to include references to consumer health in addition to trade facilitation as an objective in the Preamble. IACFO has repeatedly expressed concern that the Committee might be subjugated to the pursuit of trade facilitation while neglecting food safety concerns.

Equivalence (i.e. mutual acceptance of another Member's risk-minimising measures that may differ in process but have an equivalent effect under Article 4 of the WTO SPS Agreement) will also be discussed at an informal meeting preceding the upcoming SPS Committee meeting on 20-21 March. Documents of the Codex Committee meeting are available at: http://www.codexalimentarius.net/ccfics10/fc02_01e.htm.

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