International trade law and local food policy in Canada

After World War II, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – now managed under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – became the framework under which many and eventually most of the world‟s nations embarked on steady path towards trade liberalisation after the protectionist phase of the interbellum and Great Depression years. [...] The economic and debt crises of the 1980s led to structural adjustment programmes, often voluntary in the North and encouraged – arguably forced – by conditional lending programmes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the South, that put an end to the agricultural exception. [...] DOCUMENT International Trade Law and Local Food System Policy in Canada 11 Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures The beef hormone dispute between the US and Canada “provided the impetus to develop a detailed sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures code under the auspices of the WTO legal framework, in order to specify what is permissible when countries regulate the environmental health and safety [...] GIs are an established convention in international law, having been the subject of the Paris Convention of 1883, the Madrid agreement (1891), the Stresa Convention (1951), and the Lisbon Agreement (1958) before finally coming under the aegis of the WTO‟s Trade-Related Intellectual Property rights (TRIPS) agreement. [...] For example, imports of apples with high residues of certain toxic fertilisers can be banned on the grounds that the toxin is a health hazard for the people who will be consuming them in the importing country – not on the grounds that it is a hazard for the workers applying the toxin (which is often far more hazardous) in the producing country.