Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

The WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (WTO-SPS, 1994) and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (WTO-TBT, 1994) recognise as the international standards, guidelines and... 

Many EU Member States participate actively in the work of the Codex Committee on Pesticide Residues (CCPR), which is hosted by The Netherlands. Before and during each CCPR meeting, EC positions are co-ordinated as far as possible. In view of the special status attached to Codex MRLs since the signing of the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (the SPS Agreement), the EC now attaches great importance to Codex work. 

World Trade Organisation (2000a) Agreement on the application of sanitary and phytosanitary measures, in The Legal Texts—The Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations. Cambridge University Press, pp. 59-120. 

The importance of Codex standards is that they offer a globally harmonized, unbiased and authoritative source of MRLs that take into account the various national GAP for a particular pesticide-commodity as well as available residue trial data. The authoritative nature of Codex MRLs has, in fact, been recognized and agreed in principle (if not always in practice) by the maj ority of important trading countries. The World Trade Organization (WTO), through a 1995 agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS), identified Codex... 

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