In January 2011, the US passed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) which represents a major legislative initiative to revise and strengthen the regulatory regime pertaining to foodborne illness and contamination. The tightening of the regulatory regime was justified on the basis of a number...

A number of major agricultural exporting countries responded to high food prices from 2007 to 2010 by imposing export restrictions on agricultural commodities in efforts to constrain domestic food-price inflation. These restrictions reduced the volume of internationally traded food, and...

Food safety regulations limit trade in bioproducts. Every country, however, has a duty to protect its citizens from food safety hazards. If risks are increasing under an existing food safety system then a strengthening of the regulatory regime can be justified, with the inevitable negative...

Movement toward the objective of undistorted world agricultural markets has been set back by the lapse since 2008 of the WTO Doha Round negotiations. In the absence of a new agreement, constraints on distortionary agricultural domestic support remain lax. One might have expected policies of...

I provide a stocktaking on the profile of regional trade agreements in the global trading system over the last decade focusing heavily on the period since the 2008 financial crisis and relying heavily on WTO notifications. Regional agreements cover both regional trade agreements and broader...

International trade in wheat accounts for approximately one third of world grain trade and is expected to double by 2050.The KRU (Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine) countries account for approximately a quarter of world wheat exports and are collectively considered one of the key wheat exporting...

Canada is currently negotiating a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the European Union; the issue of Geographic Indications (GIs) is on the negotiating agenda and is expected to be one of the most contentious issues in the negotiations. While the exact nature of protection...

Despite the presence of food miles labels and carbon labels on the market for many years, relatively little data is available on how consumers respond to these labels. It is one thing to show people saying in surveys they will use carbon labels, and quite another to have evidence of people...

Trade in genetically modified (GM) products remains a major issue in agricultural trade policy. In particular, the European Union has sought to deny market access to GM-products. In the wake of a WTO case brought by Canada and the US, among others, against an import ban imposed on genetically...