ARTIFICIAL BARRIERS- serious threat to International Agri trade

The major problems that have been encountered by the Indian Exporters is the arbitrary quality and technical restrictions setting by the western markets This is despite clear cut requirement of WTO standards regarding food security and technical barriers to trade The major problem with this regard is continuous shifting of quality standards and specifications to the ignorance of the exporters of the third world countries A lot of times Indian Exporters send consignements to countries only to discover that they have failed some specific quality or technical norm and consignements have to be returned The number of these TBT (technical barriers to trade) have increased sharply from just 365 in 1995 to 1030 in 2007 China alone has 560 TBT measures followed by USA and european union India has already asked the WTO to examine these multiplicity of international standards These non tariff measures (NTM) the efforts should be made by the member countries to list these NTMs Once WTO makes it mandatory to post all NTM data there would be some sense of uniformity which would obligate the countries not to change the standards frequently Moreever exporters would know the existing standards in the destination countries Sometimes WTO prescribed international certification is not considered by various groups The requirement of Aflatoxin in Groundnut is prescribed at 15 parts per billion by CODEX whereas EU has a standard of 4 PPB These multiplicity standards creates hurdle in the smooth flow of international agri business