Ratcheting up protective regulations in the shadow of the WTO: NGO strategy and food safety standard-setting in India

ABSTRACT

How does the World Trade Organization (WTO) shape contests among civil society organizations, transnational firms, and states over domestic regulations that protect human health, such as food safety standards? The WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS Agreement) aims to limit the use of non-tariff barriers like regulatory standards as protectionist measures. Yet, few attempts have been made to explore how these rules shape national policy-making processes, and particularly the ability of civil society organizations to ratchet up protective regulations. Through a study of standard-setting for pesticide residues in soft drinks in India, I argue that WTO rules are at once legal obligations backed by the coercive threat of economic sanctions and discursive standards for what constitutes ‘appropriate regulatory practice.’ As discursive standards, the rules shape the rationalities and strategies of diverse actors in domestic regulatory contests. These standards of appropriate regulatory practice are used instrumentally by transnational firms to undermine the influence of civil society in policy-making but can also offer opportunities for civil society organizations to contest and even enlarge the boundaries of appropriate regulatory practice.

KEYWORDS:

• World Trade Organization
• food safety
• domestic regulation
• precautionary principle
• India
• institutional power

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Brandon Lardy, Margaret Morris, and Emily Walker for research assistance, Jonathan Scheerer for assistance in understanding the intricacies of analytical chemistry, and Joseph Conti, Brent Kaup, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript. All responsibility for the content is my own. This research was funded in part by a William & Mary Faculty Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For example, transnational firms pushed for the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which most analysts view as more of a protectionist than a ‘free market’ measure. As well, the US state, while agreeing to agricultural liberalization through the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), has made limited efforts to implement this Agreement in order to continue its agricultural subsidy regime. This had led some scholars to consider the WTO as part of a project of ‘uneven liberalization,’ or liberalization largely in those sectors that benefit transnational firms and powerful states (see Quark 2013: chapter 3).

2 Some scholars have considered the operation of discursive power in WTO negotiations, which is a related but distinct issue. These studies have largely focused on the role of states in the Global South in forwarding alternative norms/frames in negotiations (Eagleton-Pierce, 2012, 2013; Odell, 2009; Odell and Sell, 2006, but see Lang [2011] on civil society and professionals).

3 In this paper, I treat material and discursive forms of power as analytically distinct. That said, this is, on one level, an artificial distinction. Material power is rarely, if ever, exercised without discursive justification, and discursive power is not determined by but is certainly structured by material power relations. Material and discursive power relations are thus mutually constitutive in ways that this analytical distinction simplifies. This is evident in the discussion above regarding the ways in which the neoliberal policy paradigm was instantiated within the WTO. Here, neoliberalism was a set of policy ideas that, when implemented in the US, helped to build the material power of transnational firms (Chorev, 2007), who then used both this enhanced material power and the discursive legitimation of the neoliberal policy paradigm to legitimate the establishment of the WTO around neoliberal principles. The material and discursive moments within the construction and exercise of this power are difficult to separate analytically.

Additional information

Funding

College of William & Mary Faculty Summer Grant.

Notes on contributors

Amy A. Quark

Amy A. Quark is an associate professor of sociology at the College of William & Mary. She has authored a book, Global Rivalries: Standards Wars and the Transnational Cotton Trade, and numerous articles on transnational governance and global inequalities.