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The current Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) has managed to solved plenty of problems that persisted before the adoption of this convention and which were associated with trade restrictive measures imposed by a given state hiding protectionism purposes. Thus, the multilateral trade system was able again to protect the interests of the exporting countries while granting the importing countries specific guarantees that were listed in the SPS agreement. However, as usual, the legislator is not capable of foreseeing all the potential legal dilemmas that might occur as a result of the adoption of a legal text or convention in this case. As such, in practice, it was revealed that there is an issue related to the diverse standards that could and were indeed imposed by the different countries when adopting SPS measures in accordance with the agreement. In fact, “while requiring that SPS measures be science-based, non-discriminatory, and applied only to the extent necessary to protect health, the SPS Agreement leaves much room for Members to make policy choices regarding the level of protection they wish to ensure within their territories.” In this context, it is impossible for a country exporting a specific product to respect all the standards that are imposed by each importing country which have created problems in practice and there was a need to solve this urgent matter. In the Chapter “Health Protection Measures as Barriers to EU Exports to China in the Framework of the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures,” the author Denis Prevost have examined this legal dilemma while clarifying the ways through which the multilateral trade system provided a solution for this problem. Furthermore, the author has focused on several case studies reflecting SPS measures imposed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) against European products. Hence, the latter could not get access to the Chinese markets as a result. In fact, in order to solve the issue of different SPS standards imposed by the different countries, states are asked: “to harmonize their SPS requirements with the standards developed by the existing authoritative international bodies in the area of food safety, animal health, and plant health.” For instance, states could harmonize their SPS requirements with the standards of the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) for food safety; the Secretariat of the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) for plant health standards, and the World Animal Health Organization and so on. Indeed, these different international standards were used several times by the European Union in its claims against China which was accused of imposing SPS measures that do not reflect these standards. One could mention for example the conflicts that took place as a result of China’s SPS measures to address risks from H1N1 (swine flu), bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE or mad cow disease), and several plant health risks or the trade conflict between China and the EU concerning a Chinese regulation on wood packaging material.
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