Organização mundial do comércio e Codex Alimentarius: a institucionalização da qualidade no mercado internacional de alimentos

Abstract

In the last decades of the 20th century, trade protectionism got new principles. The international trade experts said that is observed in world trade, currently, a neoprotectionism. What is striking is that some of these new protection mechanisms have gained support, especially society, as are supported by legitimate reasons, for example, regarding the protection of consumer health. However, some countries, especially developing, claim that this new protectionism, despite its legitimacy, continues with the same function: to protect markets. Thus, it appears that from 1947, with the establishment of GATT and through rounds of negotiation, tariff barriers have been reduced significantly, however, at the same time, other forms of trade barriers, more subtle, difficult to identify were created, the calls non-tariff measures. Among these measures, in this thesis, there are the sanitary and phytosanitary measures. What encouraged this research was precisely the paradoxical nature that surrounds this issue, because, on the one hand the sanitary and phytosanitary measures represent serious concerns about the safety and protection of human health and on the other, they also can represent veiled protectionism creating restrictions on international trade. So, ask yourself: how to ensure that such measures are not used indiscriminately by countries? What mechanisms to curb these actions? This thesis aims to demonstrate that with the advent of non-tariff measures, particularly the SPS, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was compelled to create a legal and institutional, to curb opportunistic behavior, because what is happening is that certain countries use the sanitary and phytosanitary measures in an arbitrary and unjustified. The hypothesis that guides this work is that the notifications and harmonization bodies have a key role to ensure that sanitary and phytosanitary measures do not transformem in trade barriers. Increasingly countries are meeting sanitary and phytosanitary standards set by the WTO, through notifications, and participating in international standardization organizations such as the Codex Alimentarius. To prove this hypothesis are used two instruments: the first is to examine the notifications relating to sanitary and phytosanitary measures issued to the WTO, in the period 1995-2011, and the second is the analysis of a questionnaire applied to several countries in the period 2002 by the Joint FAO / WHO Codex Alimentarius. Especially, it is concluded that: in general, the number of reports on matters relating to sanitary and phytosanitary issues, increased, which demonstrated the concern of countries to meet the recommendations of the WTO. However, the WTO can t curb totally opportunistic, because the survey group by FAO / WHO, all countries surveyed responded that Codex standards are relevant, however, in the meetings held by this group countries trade accusations, claiming that they are few who adopt the standards. Understand countries? They recognize the standards, but not adopt! Our theoretical framework helped us understand that the Codex standards, based on science, are important, however, the political power of some countries in international trade is higher. Thus, we conclude that the Codex reflects the asymmetry of power existing in the WTO, demonstrating that often science is subordinated to politics.