The Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations, which began in Punta del Este in September 1986, concluded in Marrakech in April 1994 [3]. The Marrakech Agreement established a new World Trade Organization (WTO) to succeed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Uruguay Round negotiations were the first to deal with the liberalization of trade in agricultural products, an area excluded from previous Rounds of negotiations. The Uruguay Round also included negotiations on reducing non-tariff barriers to international trade in agricultural products and concluded with two binding Agreements: the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (the SPS Agreement) and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (the TBT Agreement). The Agreements will be applied by members of the WTO.

The SPS Agreement confirms the right of WTO member countries to apply measures necessary to protect human, animal, and plant life and health. This right was included in the original 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as a general exclusion from the other provisions of the Agreement, provided that "such measures are not applied in a manner which would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between countries where the same conditions prevail, or a disguised restriction on international trade." Despite this general condition for the application of national measures to protect human, animal, and plant life and health, it had become apparent by the time of the Punta del Este Declaration that national sanitary and phytosanitary measures had become, whether by design or accident, effective trade barriers.

The SPS Agreement, therefore, sets new rules in an area previously excluded from GATT disciplines. The purpose of the SPS Agreement is to ensure that measures established by governments to protect human, animal, and plant life and health in the agricultural sector only are consistent with obligations prohibiting arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination on trade between countries where the same conditions prevail, or which are a disguised restriction on international trade. It requires that, with regard to food-safety measures, WTO members base their national measures on international standards, guidelines, and other recommendations adopted by the FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission where they exist, except that they may adopt stricter measures if there is a scientific justification for doing so or if the level of protection afforded by the Codex standard is inconsistent with the level of protection generally applied and deemed appropriate by the country concerned. The SPS Agreement covers all food-hygiene measures and food-safety measures, such as the control of residues of veterinary drugs, pesticides, or other chemicals used in meat production,

The SPS Agreement states that any measures taken that conform to international Codex standards, guidelines, or other recommendations are deemed to be appropriate, necessary, and non-discriminatory. Furthermore, the SPS Agreement calls for a programme of harmonization of national requirements based on international standards. This work is guided by a WTO Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures to which representatives of Codex Alimentarius, the Office International des Epizes (OIE), and the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) are invited.

The TBT Agreement is a revision of the Agreement of the same name first developed under the Tokyo Round of GATT Negotiations in the 1970s. Examples given in the TBT Agreement of legitimate TBT measures are those the objectives of which are national security and the prevention of deceptive practices. The objective of the Agreement is to prevent the use of national or regional technical requirements, or standards in general, as unjustified technical barriers to trade. It covers all types of standards, including quality requirements for foods, except requirements related to sanitary and phytosanitary measures, and includes a very large number of measures designed to protect the consumer against deception and economic fraud. The Agreement basically provides that all technical standards and regulations must have a legitimate purpose and that the impact or cost of implementing the standard must be proportional to the purpose of the standard. It also states that if there are two or more ways of achieving the same objective, the least trade-restrictive alternative should be followed. The TBT Agreement also places emphasis on international standards, WTO members being obliged to use international standards or parts thereof except where the international standard would be ineffective or inappropriate in the national situation. The TBT Agreement does not include a programme of harmonizing national standards.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission was established by FAO in 1961. Since 1962 it has been responsible for implementing the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme, the primary aims of which are protecting the health of the consumer and ensuring fair practices in the food trade. The Codex Alimentarius Commission is an intergovernmental body, with 154 member governments. The Codex Alimentarius itself is a collection of food standards, codes of practice, and other recommendations presented in a uniform way [4]. Codex Alimentarius means "Food Code" or "Food Law" in Latin. Codex standards, guidelines, and other recommendations ensure that food products are not harmful to the consumer and can be traded safely between countries.

Food-safety standards are defined in the SPS Agreement as those relating to food additives, veterinary drug and pesticide residues, contaminants, methods of analysis and sampling, and codes and guidelines of hygienic practice. As mentioned above. Codex food-safety standards are to be used as the reference point for the WTO in this area. Over the years, the Codex Alimentarius Commission has established maximum residue limits for 182 agricultural and veterinary chemicals, 39 codes of hygienic and good manufacturing practice, and 227 Codex standards. It has evaluated over 700 chemicals proposed for food-additive uses and established guideline levels for a number of environmental and industrial contaminants in foods, including radionuclides.

Food hygiene has been a major activity of the Codex since its establishment. The Codex Committee on Food Hygiene is hosted by the government of the United States and has held 27 sessions since 1963. Because food hygiene is best regulated at the production and processing stage in the exporting country, the Committee's main outputs have been Codes of Hygienic Practice rather than end-product microbiological standards. The Codex Alimentarius Commission has been actively revising much of its work in recent years to stress the so-called horizontal aspects of food regulation, including food hygiene. New considerations, such as risk analysis and the determination of equivalence in different food-control systems, have an impact on the new approach to international food-hygiene regulations.