| Tim Büthe Delegation of Regulatory Authority to International Organizations: The Politics of Food Safety |
| Food safety is a politically particularly sensitive regulatory issue, and rich democracies have over time developed elaborate regulatory systems to detect and safeguard against food safety risks from agricultural production through high sanitary standards for processing and transporting food items. But today, a large and growing share of the food consumed in OECD countries is imported, such as more than 60% of fruits and vegetables, and more than 75% of seafood consumed in the United States, and much of it fully processed and ready for sale to end-consumers. Domestic regulations are no longer sufficient to ensure food safety under these circumstances—and divergent domestic regulations risk creating non-tariff barriers to trade. |
| WTO member states have sought to address these problems by committing themselves through the WTO's SPS-Agreement to the use of "international" sanitary standards as the technical basis of national regulations that seek to protect human, animal, and plant health and safety. ("SPS-Agreement" is short for the "Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures," which is an integral part of the founding treaty of the World Trade Organization.) Countries may require compliance with more stringent SPS standards only when existing international standards are not sufficient to achieve the desired level of protection for human, animal, and plant health. Moreover, regulations based on divergent standards are open to challenge through the WTO dispute settlement mechanism, where the burden of proof falls on the country with the divergent standards to show that such measures have scientific justification. The country requiring divergent standards also must prove that international standards are insufficient, so that the national standards do not constitute unnecessary non-tariff barriers to trade. International standards are, for the purposes of the SPS-Agreement, defined as the standards developed by three international organizations external to the WTO: the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), the World Animal Health Organization (OIE), and the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC). Regulations based on CAC, OIE, or IPPC standards are safe from such challenges, since the SPS-Agreement declares them to be categorically in WTO compliance. Member states of the WTO have thus delegated regulatory authority to these international organizations. And it matters: Several WTO disputes over often politically sensitive health and safety regulations have been won or lost based on the SPS-Agreement. |
| In this research project, I ask why states decided to institutionalize international cooperation in this realm and why they chose delegation of regulatory authority to international organizations outside of the WTO as the particular form of that cooperation. To answer these questions, I draw on principal-agent theory—which I situate explicitly in the broader theoretical literature in IR—but I also examine the role of norms and ideas, especially with a view to the implications of international delegation for notions of sovereignty. Moreover, I ask why CAC, OIE, and IPPC (only) were specified in the SPS-Agreement as the sources of "international" SPS standards (as "agents" in the terminology of principal-agent theory). The answer to this question should yield insights into the important issue of agent selection in international delegation, since several other, ex ante equally plausible international standard-setting organizations were proposed by various countries during the negotiations of the SPS-Agreement, but were not recognized in the final text of the Agreement. Here, principal-agent theory may need to be supplement by key insights from the Institutional Complementarity Theory regarding information flows across different organizational levels. The empirical analysis is based on recently declassified documents from the negotiations that led to the SPS-Agreement and extensive interviews with many of the original negotiators and some representatives of the international organizations, which themselves became actors in the process that made some of them agents. This research has lead to a series of papers, some published, others work in progress: |
| Tim Büthe. "The Globalization of Health and Safety Standards: Delegation of Regulatory Authority in the SPS-Agreement of the 1994 Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization." Law and Contemporary Problems vol.71 no.1 (Winter 2008): 219-255. |
| Tim Büthe. "Agent Selection in the International Delegation of Regulatory Authority: Food Safety, Health Regulations, and Free Trade under the WTO." Unpublished manuscript, Duke University and University of California, Berkeley, 2009. |
| Tim Büthe. "The Politics of Food Safety in the Age of Global Trade: The Codex Alimentarius in the SPS-Agreement of the WTO." In Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy, edited by Cary Coglianese, Adam Finkel, and David Zaring. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009: 88-109. |
| Tim Büthe and Nathaniel Harris. "The Codex Alimentarius Commission: A Hybrid Public-Private Regulator." In Handbook of Transnational Governance: Institutions and Innovations, edited by Thomas Hale and David Held. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011: 219-228. |
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