Nairobi — The use of technical barriers by Western countries has become the biggest obstacle for developing countries trying to expand their trade.

As a result of agreements negotiated at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), traditional trade protection measures such as tariffs and quotas are falling away. But they are being replaced by domestic regulations that permit countries to bar products from entering their markets if the products do not meet certain standards.

These obstacles include measures ostensibly aimed at protecting citizens from everyday food hazards, known in WTO language as sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS).

"High tariffs remain a significant barrier," says South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, "but non-tariff barriers, such as arbitrarily imposed phytosanitary rules, further limit goods" exported to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - a grouping of 30 wealthy nations.

The use of technical barriers has grown during the past two decades. In an effort to regularise such standards, the 148-member WTO's Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures came into force in 1995.

The agreement was designed to provide uniform rules for all laws, regulations and requirements regarding how a product is produced, processed, stored or transported, to ensure that its import does not pose a risk to human, animal or plant health.

The SPS agreement requires, for instance, that goods be imported from disease-free areas, inspected prior to export and not exceed maximum levels of pesticide or insecticide use.

The agreement is also meant to prevent countries from using SPS measures simply to block trade, stating explicitly that the measures cannot be employed in "a manner which would constitute a disguised restriction on international trade."

But although importing countries are encouraged to use existing international standards, they are nevertheless allowed to adopt stricter regulations if they can provide scientific justification for their actions.

Hezron Nyangito of the Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research and Analysis notes that while the agreement aims at safeguarding the health of citizens, it also provides a loophole that allows countries to introduce measures that result in higher levels of protection than the international norm.

While there is a clear need for SPS measures to protect consumers, the benefits of trade liberalisation in the agricultural sector achieved by the 1994 Uruguay Round trade negotiations could be undermined by the protectionist use of sanitary and phytosanitary measures, warns Simonetta Zarrilli of the UN Conference on Trade and Development.

There are many examples of SPS measures being used to restrict African goods from overseas markets. For several years in the late 1990s, for example, European countries banned fish from Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda due to concerns about these countries' sanitary standards and control systems.

The World Bank says Uganda lost $36.9 million in potential earnings during the ban.

In Tanzania, where fish and fish products accounted for 10 per cent of annual exports, fishermen dependent on EU sales lost 80 per cent of their income.

"Some of the requirements are legitimate with respect to food safety," notes Mr Nyangito, the Kenyan researcher. "But many African countries find it difficult to meet the standards because of technical and resource-capacity constraints."

Studies in Kenya show that to comply with high EU standards, farmers would have to spend 10 times more than they currently do. To comply, Uganda would need to spend $300 million upgrading its honey-processing plants and coffee producers would spend 200 per cent more to produce coffee at the required standard.

If the EU were to use interna- tional standards on pesticides on bananas, rather than its more restrictive ones, annual African exports would increase by $400 million, according to the March 2005 report of the Commission for Africa, a high-level panel established by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

African meat exports to the US, dairy products to the EU and animal products destined for Japan often face restrictions on health grounds, notes Mr Nyangito. Affected countries regard these hindrances as discriminatory, "because the restrictions are not specific, but depend on the inspections that are undertaken at the time," says Mr Nyangito.

The EU's Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, David Byrne, agrees that, "There is an image that the EU, along with other developed countries, uses food-safety standards for protectionist ends."

However, he says that SPS measures in the EU are not intended to block trade, but to safeguard the region's health standards.

"I fully accept that the EU sets very high food-safety standards and that these are difficult to meet, in particular for developing countries, but I make no apology for these high standards," he says.

SPS measures can become especially complicated when different countries make different assessments of the nature of the risk or have different degrees of risk tolerance, notes Leonardo Lacovone, an economic adviser in Mozambique's Agriculture Ministry.

"In some cases, there are differences in the views expressed by experts and in other cases we may essentially be faced with political pressure based on a widespread but not universal public fear."

The EU's campaign to "harmonise international standards" from intellectual property rights to environmental regulations presents a major challenge for the WTO, notes Razeen Sally of the London School of Economics in a study on EU policy.