Meeting EU standards
meet new EU food safety regulations that are due to come into force
in January 2005. These laws will make it mandatory for all fruit
and vegetable products arriving in the EU to be traceable at all
stages of production, processing and distribution.
And in the wake of mad cow disease and other scares, European authorities are demanding ever tighter food quality controls. Bur some industry experts are warning that the new regulations will force many rural farmers in the developing world out of business.
The small-scale production of export crops has been a conscious poverty-reducing policy of many African nations, but many of these smallholdings will be unable to afford the changes necessary to ensure complete traceability and compliance with the new EU laws. This, say some development experts, represents a blow to third world farmers who have managed to move away from subsistence farming and into the cultivation of cash crops for export.
The EU is providing training for exporters and technicians through its Pesticide Initiatives Programme. But this programme has a budget of only €30m, which has to be spread across 77 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. Some see this as evidence that the EU is not serious about encouraging food exports from outside the bloc, and that strict hygiene standards are being used by the west as an economic tool to block food imports from developing economies.
The bird flu epidemic in Asia is a good example. Following the outbreak, the EU immediately put in place measures to ensure protection against any possibility of the disease being introduced within the bloc. Fresh and frozen Thai poultry products have been barred from the economic bloc until 15 August 2004, and the ban also covers imports of pet birds from Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Pakistan, China, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. The EC says that the decision is in line with OIE (International Organisation of Animal Health) guidelines.
But Professor Bhanupong Nidhiprabha, a member of a Thai research team studying safety standards in the food trade, said that rich countries are simply finding they can draw up arbitrary safety standards then ban imports, saying it is their sovereign right. This reflects the unfair balance of power in food production. The leading 10 food producers are all developing countries, while the main markets are the European Union, the US and Japan.
"The political and social implications of the laws are potentially quite huge," Sicily Kariuki, the director of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya told the Financial Times. "It is not because what we are being asked to do is un-doable. It's more in terms of the investment."
