A race to the top? A case study of food safety standards and African exports

About

Countries

Data & Research

Learning

News

Projects & Operations

Publications

Topics

Home > Data & Research > Author Profile > Report Details

A race to the top? A case study of food safety standards and African exports, Volume 1

Author:	Otsuki, Tsunehiro; Wilson, John S.; Sewadeh, Mirvat;	Collection Title:	Policy, Research working paper ; no. WPS 2563
Country:	Africa;	Date Stored:	2001/03/30
Document Date:	2001/03/31	Document Type:	Policy Research Working Paper
Language:	English	Major Sector:	Agriculture, fishing, and forestry
Region:	Africa	Report Number:	WPS2563
Sub Sectors:	Other Agriculture	SubTopics:	Environmental Economics & Policies; Economic Theory & Research; Free Trade; Food & Beverage Industry; Health Economics & Finance
Volume No:	1

Summary: Growing concern over health risks associated with food products is at the forefront of trade policy debate. At the heart of this debate is the "precautionary principle," which holds that precautions should be taken against health, safety, and environmental risks even when science has not established direct cause-and-effect relationships--as with, for example, the EUropean ban on hormone-treated beef. The authors quantify the impact on food exports from African countries of new EUropean Union standards for aflatoxins, structurally related toxic compounds that contaminate certain foods and lead to the production of acute liver carcinogens in the human body. The authors estimate the impact of changes in differing levels of such protection based on the EU standards (and suggested by international standards) for 15 EUropean countries and 9 African countries between 1989 and 1998. The results suggest that implementation of the EU's new aflatoxin standards will significantly hurt African exports to EUrope of nuts, cereals, and dried fruits, which are highly sensitive to the aflatoxin standards. The EU standards would reduce health risks by only about 1.4 deaths per billion a year but would cut African exports by 64 percent, or $670 million, compared with their level under international standards.


Official Documents Official, scanned versions of documents (may include signatures, etc.)
File Type		Description	File Size (mb)

	PDF 36 pages	Official version*	2.52 (approx.)
	Text	Text version**


Light-Weight Documents Lighter (less MB) documents which may or may not be the final, official version
File Type		Description	File Size (mb)

	PDF 32 pages	WPS2563	0.09

* The official version is derived from scanning the final, paper copy of the document and is the official,
archived version including all signatures, charts, etc.

** The text version is the OCR text of the final scanned version and is not an accurate representation of the final text.
It is provided solely to benefit users with slow connectivity.

Permanent URL for this page: http://go.worldbank.org/3NQ9P2E4P0