Codex Alimentarius and World Trade Organization have/had a generic relationship

Reference point food standards Codex Alimentarius
Reference point food standards World Trade Organization
Start Date 1995-00-00
Notes Since the early 1960s, this Codex, published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), became an instrument for setting international food standards. Within its first decade, the Codex had developed a variety of standards for products ranging from honey to lard, canned fruit and vegetables, rendered pork fat and fish sticks; they also established food labelling guidelines, standards for scientific methods of analysis, as well as tolerances and parameters for food additives, food hygiene and pesticide residues. Inspired by the work of its European predecessor, a group known as the Codex europaeus, these two UN agencies assembled teams of health professionals, government civil servants, medical and scientific experts to draft the food standards. The Codex was intended to meet the agencies' twin aims of protecting human health and promoting trade interests of its member states. Once ratified, the food standards were distributed to governments for adoption and implementation on a voluntary basis. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, several factors began to increase pressure on worldwide markets. With the rising trade agenda of the 1970s, and in the wake of the 1972 global financial and food crisis, the 1973-74 oil crisis, and an increased focus by world leaders on the North-South divide, by the early 1980s it became of paramount importance to harmonize and establish international standards for many commodities and products. This need for standardization was apparent, and some of the issues and tensions inherent to the process of harmonization of food standards first played out on a regional level within the European Economic Community, a microcosm of the Codex.2 By 1985, a resolution passed by the UN 1 FAO/WHO, “Purpose and Scope of the Codex Alimentarius” ALINORM 62/8/WHO, 1962. Report of the Joint FAO/WHO Conference on Food Standards. 1-5 October 1962. Geneva, page 8 2 W.H. B. Denner. 1990. “Food Additives: Recommendations for Harmonization and Control” In: Food Control. 1(3): 150-162. 2 General Assembly strongly urged that the Codex serve as the basis for informing national food policy of governments worldwide. By the mid-1990s, the World Trade Organization (WTO) identified the Codex as a key reference point for scientific food standards.3
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