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Commensalistic institutions and value conflicts: the World Trade Organization and global private food standardsa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2014

Linda Courtenay Botterill  and
Carsten Daugbjerg
Linda Courtenay Botterill*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Business, Government & Law, University of Canberra, Australia
Carsten Daugbjerg
Affiliation:
Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Australia Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
*
*E-mail: Linda.Botterill@canberra.edu.au
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Abstract

An important outcome of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). This was set up to discipline the use of national food safety and animal and plant health regulations and to prevent their emergence as technical barriers to trade. The Agreement privileges free trade and scientific evidence, thus excluding many ethical considerations from the regulations that national governments can enact in relation to production methods in the agri-food chain. Autonomously from the SPS Agreement, a number of global private standard schemes have been developed that have incorporated values rejected by the SPS Agreement. This paper examines the relationship between the Agreement and the private standards and argues that this case highlights a gap in the institutional literature with respect to parallel institutions emerging autonomously from the primary institution to embody values excluded by the latter. We adopt the term commensalism for these previously undescribed relationships.

Keywords

food standardsinstitutionsvaluesWTO
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 23 - 42
Copyright
© European Consortium for Political Research 2014 

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Footnotes

a

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at IPSA’s XXII World Congress of Political Science, Madrid 8–12 July 2012 and at the ECPR General Conference, Bordeaux, 4–7 September 2013.

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