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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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